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CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



EVERY FIRESIDE 



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•Wit, "WisbOM, am pareos 



BY 



Charles F\ Deems, D.D., IvL.D., 
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Pastor of the Church of the Strangers, New York, 



WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 

HON. CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 



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NEW YORK : 

HUNT & EATON, ISO Fifth Ave., cor. Twentieth St. 

1890. 



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Copyright, 1889, by 
New York. 



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N dictating an introduction to this work I am 
actuated by two motives — personal friendship 
for the author and admiration for his book. 

The work has been lying upon my desk for several 
weeks, and I have taken it up at various times, dipping 
into it here and there as a busy man naturally would. I 
have been impressed with the wide range of Dr. Deems's 
studies, the breadth of his sympathies, and his wise way 
of putting things. 

The Doctor has been a man of great activity and a 
multifarious author, but while with most voluminous writers 
their utterances are purely ephemeral, the Doctor manages 
to put into every article from his pen something worth 
preserving. 

It is well known that Dr. Deems had the confidence 
of Commodore Vanderbilt, whose practical judgment was 
probably keener and more accurate than that of any other 
man who ever lived in this country, and upon the Doctor's 



INTRODUCTION. 

advice the Commodore spent hundreds of thousands of 
dollars for beneficent objects. 

The qualities which impressed Dr. Deems upon Com- 
modore Vanderbilt, and also upon his son William H., are 
every-where evident in this book — honesty of purpose, a 
clear conception of the object in view, lucidity of state- 
ment, and wisdom of suggestion. I am sure this work 
will be found of value in the home circle, both to the 
old and to the young. 



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New York, May, 1890. 



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Copyright, 1889, by Hunt & Eaton, New York. 




A PRELIMINARY CHIP. &«&- 




When all one's repast is set upon the table there is no need of a 
bill of fare. 

If all this book could be seen upon the first page there would be 
no room for a preface ; but it may be of some interest to the reader 
to have a history of the different parts of a large volume. 

In regard to many portions of this book the reader will find such 
histories interspersed in appropriate places. 

But there may be some reason for telling why the volume came 
into existence in its present shape. The author cannot plead the act 
which defends infants in cases of indiscretion. He has been writ- 
ing for the press for more than half a century. As his books had 
attained a very respectable circulation, and as one or two of his pro- 
ductions had obtained a more than ordinary sale, he was led, no 
f matter how, to suppose that a collection of his booklets and mag- 
azine articles brought together, with some new and timely matter, 
might be acceptable to the public. 

Every author has his own following of readers, and every new 
book he prepares for the press, if it be at all worthy, is likely to 
enlarge this following. All his old friends know what to expect as 
to his manner of thought and general style of expression ; but even 
they may be helped by having a summary statement of the contents 
of the volume. 



A PRELIMINARY CHIP. 

The intent was to make A BOOK FOR HOMES : a book which should 
enable busy people to catch up with the run of thought among 
thinkers, to have a moral stimulus in the discharge of the duties of 
life, and pleasant reading for those hours in which there were no 
pressing duties. So the book begins with the consecration of the 
household. 

It should be understood that there is a new altar erected to God 
whenever a man marries a woman. The reasons for this are given 
in the opening department called " The Home Altar." 

Next to the moral and spiritual culture in the family comes the 
intellectual development, and that opens the department of the 
" Library." If the author had been making selections from many 
writers a very different cast would have been given to this depart- 
ment ; but there is nothing in the volume, except in the quotations, 
which is not the product of one pen. 

Beyond that there is THE FAMILY CIRCLE, where all are gathered ; 
there is the evening lamp around which all read. There is something 
for Young Men in which Young Women are not deeply interested, 
and something for them for which the boys may not care so much. 
Nevertheless, in collecting for each sex some regard has been had 
to find the matter which should be interesting to the other. 

Manners have been called minor morals. In the department of 
the " BOUDOIR " have been gathered a number of articles in this 
line of culture. 

Whatever is good to read one day may be good to read any day. 
Nevertheless, there may be in some articles that which suggests 
special appropriateness for the SUNDAY AFTERNOON. 

We are not always in the house. BUSINESS has its demand, and 
often the household is dependent for its support upon the shop and 
the office. Essays that seem to be appropriate to these depart- 
ments are grouped together. That the book might be a consistent 
whole, certain articles have been prepared as connecting links. 

In correcting the proofs of this volume the author has been 



A PRELIMINARY CHIP. j 

struck with the difference between his modes of thought and styles 
of expression in the different periods of his writing life. This may, 
perhaps, also he perceived by the reader. There are some changes 
which he would have made in certain articles, but he forbore because 
it occurred to him that it is better to leave such a record, and to 
prefer a variety of styles for his reader's sake rather than to make 
uniformity with regard to his reputation as an author. But nothing 
has been allowed to go into the volume which does not have the 
author's approval at the moment of publication. 

He sends it forth in the hope that it will go into the families of 
thousands of his old friends and make for him new friends in many 
families, and that as A BOOK FOR HOMES it may achieve a large 
usefulness. 

CHARLES F. DEEMS. 

Church of the Strangers, New York, 
December 4, 1889. 




CONTENTS, 




I. The Home Altar. Pagb 

A Little History 17 

An Appeal 18 

Privilege 18 

No Specific Command 18 

Why 19 

Another View 21 

Argument Proves too Much 22 

An Important Principle 22 

What the Bible Does Teach 23 

The Saviour at Family Prayer 24 

Scriptural Examples 25 

Benefits from Family Worship 28 

Excuses 37 

"I am too timid," 37; "It is so inconvenient," 38; "I have not 
time," 39; " My family is too small," 42 ; rt My family is so large," 44 ; 
" My family will not join me," 47 ; "I am ashamed to begin," 49 ; u I 
do not know how," 51 ; •' The service will soon become dull," 52 ; " I 
have not the ability," 53. 

Suggestions 54 

Parting Words 65 

II. The Library. 

A Scotch Verdict 75 

Part I — The Case Stated, 75 ; Definitions, yj ; Neither a Religious 
nor Sentimental Question, 78 ; Re-adjustment of Terms, 82 ; Hy- 
pothesis, 84 ; Testimony of the Vegetable World, 86 ; Testimony of 
the Dakota Group, 87; Testimony of Animals, 90; Instinct, 95; 
Language, 96 ; Genius, 97 ; The Moral Sense, 98 ; Eternity of Mat- 
ter, 101 ; Relation of Evolution to Science, 102 ; The Atomic 
Theory, 105; Spontaneous Generation, 106; Is Evolution Scien- 
tific ? 1 10. 






IO CONTENTS. 

Page 
Part II. — Buddha, Jesus, and Evolution, 114; Natural Selection, 116; 

The Weak Point, 117; Important Utterances, 118; A Voice from 

the British Museum, 121. 

Christian Philosophy 122 

First Anniversary Address, 122: Objects and History of American 

Institute of Christian Philosophy, 123-134. 
Second Anniversary Address, 134: Darwin in Westminster Abbey, 134; 

Important Document, 137; Allen in Girard College, 140; Pasteur 

Among the Immortals, 142 ; President of the British Association, 143 ; 

Scientific Dogmatists, 144 ; Victoria Institute, 145 ; Joseph Cook's 

Work, 146; The School at Princeton, 147. 
Third Amiiversary Address, 149 : Modified Tone of Opponents, 149 ; 

Increased Religious Literature, 150; Increased Christian Effort, 151 ; 

Outside Christianity, 152; Infidels Desponding, 153; Dissensions in 

the Enemy's Camp, 154; Reaction Among Infidels, 156; Treatment 

of Opponents, 157 ; A Misrepresentation, 160; Scientists at Prayer, 

161 ; How to Reach the People, 162; Liberty of Prophesying, 164; 

Philosophical Cant, 165. 
Fourth An?ziversary Address, 168: Case of Galileo, 169; Use of 

Science to the Preacher, 175. 

Paul at Athens 183 

A Defense of the Superstitions of Science 195 

The Cry of Conflict 

Letters to the Popular Science Monthly 

" The Conflict of the Ages," 239 ; " What Constitutes Religion ? " 243. 

Chunks for the Thoughtful 247 

A Plea for Working-Women 247 

A Plea for Sailors 260 

The American Tract Society 268 

An Address on Unveiling a Monument to the Unknown Confederate 

Dead 272 

Chips from a Lecturer's Workshop 283 

Professor Huxley's Lectures . . . , 283 

Spontaneous Regeneration 292 

Survival of the Fittest 295 

Discoveries 296 

To the Third and Fourth Generations 298 

III. Family Hearth-stone. 

For Young Women 303 

M What Now ? " 303 

Make a Review, 307 ; Future Culture, 309 ; Your Field, 314 ; Home 



CONTENTS. II 

Pagb 

Duties, 315 ; Brothers and Sisters, 318 ; Family Servants, 320; Your 
Neighbors, 321 ; Teaching, 323 ; Not a Christian, 325 ; A Christian 
Student, 327 ; Without Social Ties, 327 ; Christian Duties, 331 ; Your 
Responsibility, 335. 

For Him : A short True Story 337 

James Brainerd Taylor's " Miss W " 341 

Mary Lyon and Lady Colquhoun 345 

Phoebe Cary 's Hymn 

For Young Men 353 

The True Basis of Manhood 353 

Success in Life 37 1 

The Great Centennial Lesson 377 

Ruth and 1 382 

Sympathy with Joy 382 

" The World Owes Me a Living " 385 

" Cui Bono ? " A Letter to Ruth 388 

Evil Unselfishness 390 

Repression 395 

Defense of Worry 398 

A Good Old Age 401 

Ruth and Dr. Phipps 404 

Readings for Sunday Evening 410 

David 410 

Paul 415 

Greater Works ....... 422 

Trusting in Riches 424 

Christian Philanthropy 426 

Causing to offend 427 

Looking 430 

Successful Failures 432 

Hereafter 435 

The Golden Rule 437 

The Field at Hand ; 441 

Instruments /\/\<\ 

Without Offense 445 

About Ships 448 

David's Sleep Experience 452 

The Large Upper Room 453 

Spiritual Dyspepsia 456 

" What Would Jesus Do?" 458 

The Evening Lamp 463 

Indirect Influence of Methodism 463 



12 CONTENTS. 

Page 

Bad New York 468 

Street Begging 47 1 

Inventions 478 

Anonymous Letters 48 1 

Perpetuated Felony 483 

One's Survivors 485 

Blessed St. Ignorance 486 

Unpraised Helpers 490 

Meekness 492 

The Uses of an Enemy 493 

Disengaging the Carriage 494 

Letting off Steam ; 498 

" The Woman in White " 501 

IV. The Boudoir. 

A Story of a Church Bonnet 505 

Elegant Simplicity 510 

Censoriousness 512 

Church Courtesies 513 

How to Cure Gossip 514 

" Russian Gossip " 515 

Presents 517 

Pleasure-Seeking 519 

V. Pastor's Study. 

Reading the Scripture Lessons in Church 523 

Preachers and Reporters : First Paper 530 

Preachers and Reporters : Second Paper 534 

Unchallenged Speakers 539 

Paul's Sleepy Hearer 546 

Sleeping in Church 548 

Ecclesiastical Changes 551 

Church Trials 553 

Schism 557 

Burning Out a Wasps' Nest 561 

Church Notices 562 

The Sick Parishioner 566 

The Sick Pastor 567 

The Church and the Sunday-school 57° 

Our Plan of Pastoral Work 572 

A " Retreat " 574 

Ministers Breaking Down in Health , 579 



CONTENTS. 13 

Pagb 

" Enduring Hardness " as a " Soldier " 582 

Independent Thinking 584 

Greater Works 586 

VI. The Office. 

Business and Education 591 

Trade Life : Its Poetry and Ethics 607 

Faith : In Wall Street. A Letter to a Friend 625 

Letters of Introduction 628 

The Ex-Convict : An Article for the Yet Unconvicted 631 

Justice and Business „ 633 

Religion and Business 635 

After Business 637 

Life's Mystic Volume : A Poem ". 640 




f 




FAMILY WORSHIP 




?F^- 




THE HOME-ALTAR 




A LITTLE HISTORY. 

[WHEN quite young in the ministry I labored earnestly to quicken into more 
earnest Christian life a portion of the parish of which I was the assistant minister. 
I never had a more discouraging undertaking. In striving to find the secret of the 
apathy of my people I discovered that there was but one family in our whole parish 
in which domestic worship was daily and regularly offered to Almighty God. This 
led me to preach on the subject. In the year 1850, while pastor at New Berne, 
N. C, I enlarged this sermon into a series of discourses, at the close of which I 
wrote the "Appeal for Family Worship " which follows. To that was added a 
series of prayers, many of which were actually composed while upon my knees 
and subsequently used while conducting the worship of my own family. There 
was also added a small collection of selected hymns, together with a table of 
lessons from the Holy Scriptures. 

The whole was published as a volume by Mr. M. W. Dodd, who at that time 
had on the title-pages of all his books the address, " Brick Church Chapel." The 
Brick Church, with its chapel, occupied the whole block on which now (1889) 
stand the Potter building and the Times building. The chapel occupied the place 
of the latter, its first floor being a store let to Mr. Dodd, who long did business on 
the premises, and who is succeeded in the business of publishing by his excellent 
sons of the firm of Dodd, Mead & Co. In 1850 Dr. Gardiner Spring was pastor 
of the Brick Church, which was subsequently removed to the corner of Fifth Ave- 
nue and Thirty-seventh Street. 

Some copies of the book have been sold every year since its first publication. 
One day in the capital city of one of our States I met a colporteur near the Capitol 
Square. The excellent and useful man pointed to the smoke curling up from four 
several chimneys into the crisp air of the clear October morning. He said : 
" Doctor, previous to about three weeks ago no family worship had been conducted 
in those houses. I left your book in each, and probably while we are standing 
here each of those families is worshiping God at its home- altar as the result of 
reading your appeal." Was not that the best kind of royalty on the book? A 
distinguished bishop said that The Home-Altar was a familiar volume which he 



1 8 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

had seen in many a family library, and was once surprised at finding a copy in a 
plain household in a small and remote village in Texas. Some time ago I was 
tiie guest of a cultivated family in a university town. When the time for family 
worship came my own book was handed me. It was a well-worn copy. Upon my 
expression of gratification I was told that it was the third in the series, the family 
having worn out its two predecessors. 

It is still published, and may be procured by those who wish to obtain the 
appeal, with the prayers and hymns in a small separate volume.] 



AN APPEAL. 



In as short a space as so important a subject will allow we 
propose to call the attention of heads of families generally to the 
duty of conducting Domestic Worship. 

PRIVILEGE. 

If it were known that all who are members of the Church rightly 
regarded the things of Christianity, that all who name the name of 
Christ had his love constantly shed abroad in their hearts, perhaps 
speakers and writers would cease to present this subject in the light 
of duty, and would, instead, unite with all good people, especially 
with all Christian parents, in rejoicing in the great privilege which 
the Head of the Church has granted to us and to our children. It 
would really seem strange that an exercise so consonant with all the 
voice of the Bible, so consistent with all the professions of Chris- 
tians, so marked with lovely and holy results, should be neglected 
by any father who has love for his God or love for his children. 
And yet the fact that there are thousands of families in this land, 
whose heads are members of the Christian Church, and by whom 
no act of domestic worship has ever been performed, impresses us 
with the necessity of calling immediate and close attention to a 
matter affecting so vastly the interests of the Church of Christ. 

NO SPECIFIC COMMAND. 

We admit, first of all, that there is no specific command in the 
Bible enjoining the duty of family prayer. This has been urged 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



19 



against its observance. That it should be by those whose morality 
is measured by the precise statements of the statute-book is not to 
us a matter of surprise. But that it should ever proceed from one 
who has read the Scriptures with any degree of devout attention, 
from one who has tasted the good things of God, from one who has 
had the promises at any time and in any measure fulfilled in his 
soul, is, we confess, a very remarkable if not unaccountable thing. 
To all such persons we kindly submit the following considerations : 

WHY. 

The Christian religion is manifestly suited to man as man, in- 
tended to be adopted by every rational human creature, in every 
age and under every circumstance. As far as practicable, therefore, 
Christianity is stripped of ceremonies. It aims to produce a re- 
formed life from a reformed heart. And when the New Testament 
shows man the way of salvation by faith, and lays down certain 
general principles for the government of the Church, and certain 
general principles for the government of man in all his social and 
spiritual connections, it leaves to this renewed heart and this in- 
structed mind the work — the blessed, improving work — of deducing 
rules for special occasions. There is one trait of human character 
which seems to have escaped the observation of many. It may be 
gathered from this statement : The man who requires a specific 
command to do that which comports with all his obligations, which 
corresponds with all the revelation God has made, and which would 
be naturally prompted by a good heart, is a man who would be the 
slowest and the last to obey such a command. Let us appeal to the 
heart of the Christian. Are you accustomed to expect your child 
to do only those things which you specifically command ? Would 
you consider him an obedient son who watched the letter of your 
direction but paid no attention to its spirit ? Do you not daily 
expect your children to do many things which they are to gather 
from the well-known principles which govern you in the manage- 
ment of your family ? And when they have done all these they are 
merely obedient. Love outstrips commands. Love flies to do what 
is most indistinctly intimated as the will and pleasure of its object. 



20 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

Let the Christian man now apply these plain principles to the 
examination of his heart and life. Does he consider that man as 
fully devoted to the cause of Christ who does only what is distinctly 
commanded in the Bible? Is not every truly pious man with whom 
the reader of this page is acquainted engaged in many things which 
the spirit of the New Testament suggests, but which are not com- 
manded ? If the neglect of any act or exercise is denounced in the 
sacred Scriptures, if the observance thereof is recorded with appro- 
bation, if the regard thereof is always followed by profit and bless- 
ing, if it be impossible to fulfill the obligations and duties created 
by the distinct precepts of the Bible while this exercise is neglected, 
who is so dull of understanding as not to perceive that it takes 
rank with all that the Bible considers duty ? 

The Scriptures do not always direct us in those things in which 
instinct, reason, and the general impulses of our nature will be 
ready and sufficient guides. If any head of a family urges as a rea- 
son why he does not conduct domestic worship that the Bible does 
not command it, it may be readily asked him why he clothes and 
feeds his children, why he sends for a physician and for medicine 
when his wife and servants are sick. If he stares at one asking such 
a question his own statement may be repeated — " the Bible does 
not command it." The Christian professes to believe that as an 
individual receives personal blessings at the hand of God, has many 
personal spiritual wants, has these wants recurring daily, and can 
have them supplied only by the Lord, it is right and proper and 
necessary that he should maintain habits of prayer ; and the more 
so since he has sins to be forgiven, and may from time to time be 
betrayed into transgression. He professes also to believe that as 
the whole body of the Church of Christ has received favors, and has 
spiritual wants, it is necessary that the Church should worship as a 
church, and that this should be done in addition to the worship 
which each individual member of the Church is supposed to offer 
to God. Now, do not the same things hold good in regard to the 
family f Are there no domestic blessings for which to thank God ? 
no domestic wants, temporal and spiritual, to drive us to the Saviour? 
no domestic short-comings and transgressions for which forgiveness 
is to be implored ? Is it not reasonable to think that if the Lord 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 21 

saw that men would be able to gather the propriety of personal and 
church worship from the Scriptures it was unnecessary to enjoin by 
special command what would promptly suggest itself as being so 
eminently accordant with what is by all acknowledged to be plainly 
taught ? If the natural man prompts the head of a family to make 
a full and ready provision for the natural wants of his wife and 
servants and children, might it not be supposed that the spiritual 
man, quicker and more sympathetic, would fly to provide for all the 
spiritual wants of his family? Or is it supposed by the Christian 
that these are the less important ? But if a man provide breakfast 
and no prayers for his children must they not be driven to the con- 
clusion that their father thinks the body more important than the 
soul ? It would seem as though the voice of a renewed heart would 
instruct a man if there were no intimations in the Scripture on this 
subject. 

ANOTHER VIEW. 

It may not be amiss to add that those who throw themselves 
back on the proposition that the Bible does not command it not 
only imply that they do nothing which is not distinctly enjoined 
in the Holy Book, but also that they regard it as the rule of 
faith and practice, and that consequently they hold themselves 
bound to do all that it does enjoin. The question very naturally 
comes, Do they? Is it possible to obey every command of the 
Scripture while one is living in neglect of family prayer? Let 
any head of a family read his Bible through, marking the pas- 
sages which distinctly enjoin a duty to his children or his servants, 
let him consider them carefully and devoutly, and then ask him- 
self how it is possible that these commands can be kept in that 
house where there is no stated domestic worship. If he is an 
impartial man, and will do this thing calmly, we think the con- 
viction will be full and clear that those who set up this general 
argument against family prayer have no enlightened view of the 
whole body of their duties, or are wanting in that religious prin- 
ciple which refines all the sentiments of the heart and leads a 
man to do not only what is demanded by the bodies but also 
what is needful for the souls of those connected with him. 



22 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

ARGUMENT PROVES TOO MUCH. 

We have considered this argument with respectful attention, 
because, if there is any force in it, it will modify our views of sev- 
eral important matters. If we are to adopt this principle rigidly, 
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, all the patriarchs and good men who lived 
in the first three thousand years of the world's history, are to be 
regarded as doing works of supererogation, for they prayed ; and 
so far as it can be discovered in the Bible the first explicit injunc- 
tion to prayer was written not much more than a thousand years 
before Christ. But we put it in a stronger light. Will the person 
who is using this argument maintain that all the good men who 
lived before the times of David were not bound to pray; that no 
obligation was upon them until the explicit injunction came from 
the mouth of an inspired man? He will not pretend that they 
did not pray ; and he is left to answer the question, Why did 
they? Will not the position we are combating be found as pow- 
erful against secret prayer and public worship as against Family- 
Prayer? We are not commanded to pray in private or to worship 
in public. The direction how to do both is given; but it is in the 
first place assumed that they will be done without an explicit 
command. 

AN IMPORTANT PRINCIPLE. 

As any discourse on this subject is supposed to be addressed to 
Christians, many things are taken for granted as believed by them. 
For instance : we certainly are not in error in supposing that every 
Christian allows that, as far as he is able, he is bound to bring 
glory to God from his family. Upon such an admission how can 
he answer this question: Do you sincerely believe that God is as 
much glorified by your family when no domestic worship is per- 
formed as when, night and morning, you and your wife, your 
children, and your servants, come together and bow down and 
kneel before God your Maker? He cannot deny that he is to do 
all that he can to promote the glory of God in his family, for 
that would make him appear " worse than an infidel ; " nor can 
he assert that God is as much glorified by a prayerless as he is by 
a praying family, for that would prove him to be brutishly stupid. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 23 

WHAT THE BIBLE DOES TEACH. 

This single fact binds it as a duty : it is implied in Holy Script- 
ure. If under obligation to do the will of God at all we are 
under obligation to do it however or whenever we learn what it is. 
No man of correct thought and feeling will deny that what is 
intimated anywhere in a revelation from God is as binding upon 
men as what is distinctly and explicitly taught. Look at what 
is said concerning prayer : " I will that men pray every -where," 
1 Tim. ii, 8. " Jesus spake a parable that men ought always to 
pray." Luke xi. ''Praying always (or at all times) with all 
prayer and supplication." Eph. vi. " In every thing, by prayer 
and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made 
known unto God." Phil, iv, 6. Now these precepts are supposed 
to be plain enough. " Every-where," " at all times," " all prayer," 
and, " every thing," are very comprehensive phrases ; so compre- 
hensive that we maintain that they include stated family prayer. 
Of no man can it be said that he prays every-where, at all times, 
with all prayer, in every thing, if he notoriously omits family 
prayer in that house over which he has control. Now, if these 
expressions do not imply family prayer, how are we to know that 
they imply private or public prayer ? For the reason which 
would exclude the one would exclude the other ; and to exclude 
all would be to assert that the passages of Scripture in which 
they occur are empty nonsense. Then there is that verse in 
1 Tim., " If any provide not for his own, and especially for those 
of his own house (kindred), he hath denied the faith, and is worse 
than an infidel." Let it be granted that the connection of this 
text refers to temporal rather than to spiritual things ; let it be 
understood to mean that he who does not provide suitable food 
and raiment for his family denies the faith of his lips by the 
deeds of his life, and is worse than the unbelieving heathen, 
whose natural feelings prompt him to do this much ; and then 
how forcible does the argument become ! For a still stronger 
reason the member of Christ's Church who fails to make pro- 
vision for the spiritual necessities of his family is a man who, 
every day of his life, sets his practice to war with his profession 



2 4 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



and is worse than the unbelieving pagans, who have their house- 
hold gods, and who take care that their families daily perform 
the rites of a darkened superstition. And has that man made 
suitable provision for the spiritual wants of his family who has 
not yet erected an altar at his hearth-stone and formally consti- 
tuted the " Church in the House ? '' 

Here, then, it appears that the Bible argument on this subject 
is not so vague as many imagine ; nor is it true, as many more 
seem to think, that there is no Bible argument to enforce this 
obligation. In Jer. x it is written : " Pour out thy fury upon 
the heathen that know thee not, and upon the families that call 
not on thy name." Now we have no disposition to take liberties 
with Scripture in order to prove a point ; its plain meaning will 
answer every good purpose of Christian thought and argumenta- 
tion. We call attention to the fact that the families who call not 
upon the name of the Lord are classed with heathen.* Of every 
family where there is no domestic altar it may be said that it 
does not call upon the name of the Lord ; as a family it renders 
him no homage and no service ; however refined and well-bred, 
so far as religion is concerned it is a heathen family in God's ac- 
count. The terrors of this passage are sufficient to drive us to 
the discharge of this duty, if we were not sweetly drawn by the 
teachings of our beloved Master. 

THE SAVIOUR AT FAMILY PRAYER. 

The inspired biographer tells us that on one occasion, when 
the Lord Jesus Christ had been praying, and ceased, his disciples 
asked to be taught how to pray. It is manifest that they did 
not ask instruction in private prayer. The Saviour did not so 
understand them. He gave them a form of social prayer. They 
constituted Christ's family. Christ had been conducting family 

* Philip Henry would say, sometimes, " If the worship of God be not in the house, write, 
Lord, have mercy upo?i us, upon the door, for there is a plague, a curse in it. It is the judg- 
ment of Archbishop Tillotson, in that excellent book which he published a little before his death 
upon this subject — That constant family worship is so necessary to keep alive a sense of God 
and religion in the minds of men that he sees not how any family that neglects it can in reason 
be esteemed a family of Christians, or indeed to have any religion at all." — See Life and Times 
of Rev. Philip Henry. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 2 $ 

prayer. They had heard him. Their hearts had burned within 
them as the Saviour prayed, and it was natural that they should 
desire to know how to continue these precious services when the 
Master was not with them. Look at the model he presents 
them. " Our Father " — not " my Father." " Give us this day 
our daily bread " — not " Give me this day my daily bread ; '* and 
so of the other petitions. It is manifest that the prayer is to be 
used socially, if we consider it as a form, and if supposed to be 
a model it still shows that our Lord is pleased when we engage 
in asking for blessings with united voices. Upon the Lord's 
Prayer, then, we remark (i) that it is to be used socially — that 
is, where several persons are engaged in prayer together ; and 
(2) that it is to be used every day. Now how can this duty be 
effectually discharged by those who have no family altar? 

SCRIPTURAL EXAMPLES. 

Not every thing done by good men is enjoined upon us by 
the Scriptures ; but surely the things which are recorded with 
divine approbation ought to find a ready imitator in every truly 
Christian man, even as any good child will make haste to imi- 
tate its elder brother whom he sees doing what he discovers is 
pleasing to a venerated and beloved parent. Now what do we 
learn of those great men whom the Bible immortalizes by its 
imperishable histories? Going back to very early times, we find 
that family religion was cultivated by Noah. Immediately after 
the flood he erected an altar, when there was no soul to worship 
except his own household. They worshiped together, as we 
find from Gen. ix, where the Lord is represented as making 
a covenant with them. " God spake unto Noah, and to his sons 
zvith him." A few chapters after the one from which we have 
just quoted we find the following high praise bestowed upon 
Abraham by the Lord : " For I knew him that he would com- 
mand his children and his household after him, and they shall 
keep the way of the Lord to do justice and judgment." The 
meaning of this seems to be that the Lord knew that Abraham 
would exert all his paternal and magisterial authority over his 



26 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

children and his servants, to constrain them to the ways of re- 
ligion. Therefore God loved him and condescended to reveal 
his purposes to him. To this example we call the attention of 
those parents who profess to be afraid to have worship with 
any regularity, lest it beget a distaste for religious things in the 
minds of their children. Abraham commanded his; and God 
admired and praised him for it. " If ye were Abraham's chil- 
dren, ye would do the works of Abraham." Gal. iii. The good 
Matthew Henry makes the following comment on Gen. xii, 7, 8 : 
" His constant practice, whithersoever he removed. As soon 
as Abraham was got to Canaan, though he was but a stranger 
and sojourner there, yet he set up, and kept up, the worship of 
God in his family ; and wherever he had a tent God had an 
altar, and that an altar sanctified by prayer. For he not only 
minded the ceremonial part of religion, the offering of sacrifice, 
but he made conscience of the natural duty of seeking to his 
God, and calling on his name ; that spiritual sacrifice with which 
God is well pleased. He preached concerning the name of the 
Lord — that is, he instructed his family and neighbors in the 
knowledge of the true God and his holy religion. The souls he 
had gotten in Haran, being discipled, must be further taught. 
Note, those who would approve themselves the children of faith- 
ful Abraham, and would inherit the blessing of Abraham, must 
make conscience of keeping up the solemn worship of God, par- 
ticularly in their families, according to the example of Abraham. 
The way of family worship is a good old way ; is no novel inven- 
tion, but the ancient usage of all the saints. Abraham was very 
rich and had a numerous family, was now unsettled and in the 
midst of enemies, and yet, wherever he pitched his tent, he 
built an altar ; wherever we go let us not fail to take our re- 
ligion along with us." All Christian parents profess to be Abra- 
ham's children, not by the flesh, but by faith. Let not Abra- 
ham's faith in the power of religious training surpass ours. 

JOB is one of the sublimest characters portrayed in the Bible. 
He not only had reputation on earth, but also in heaven. At 
a congregation of the sons of God Jehovah questioned the devil 
to know whether he had considered Job, " that there was none 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 2 J 

like unto him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one 
that feared God and eschewed evil." No ordinary servant is he 
of whom his master speaks in such lofty and unqualified 
terms. We are let into the privacy of his life at home. 
" And it was so, when the days of their (his sons') feasting were 
gone about, that Job sent and sanctified them, and rose up early 
in the morning and offered burnt-offerings, according to the num- 
ber of them all. Thus did Job continually." Here is the exam- 
ple of the man whom the Lord so highly esteemed. 

Nor can we forget the bold and explicit saying of JOSHUA 
to all the congregation, when there was religious defection in 
the camp : " Choose ye this day whom ye will serve ; as for me, 
and my house, we will serve the Lord." This expression is mean- 
ingless unless we suppose that he meant to continue acts of do- 
mestic worship. He could not become responsible for the piety 
of the individual members of his family, but he .knew what he 
could do and what he must do — he could follow the example 
of Abraham and command his household after him. 

In the 6th chapter of 2 Samuel we are told that in bringing 
the ark of the Lord from Kirjathjearim to the city of David 
it was allowed to remain in the house of Obed-edom. " And it 
was told King David, saying, The Lord hath blessed the house 
of Obed-edom and all that pertaineth unto him, BECAUSE OF 
THE ARK OF God." King David brought up the ark with re- 
ligious festivity, in which he took an active part. He played 
on instruments. He " danced with all his might." At the close 
of the protracted services, fatigued as we may suppose him to 
have been, he " returned to bless his household." He did not 
suppose that his exalted position or recent public labors could 
discharge him from the obligation to conduct domestic worship. 
For how much slighter excuses have Christians omitted this 
delightful and improving exercise ! 

A Roman centurion rebukes our prayerless families by his 
conduct, and the Lord would stir our hearts by the praise he 
pronounces upon Cornelius: "A devout man, and one that feared 
God, with all his house ; which gave much alms to the people, 
and prayed to God always." 



28 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

" The church in the house " is an expression used several 
times by the apostle Paul, and intimates to us that the early 
Christians were accustomed to have domestic worship. Did not 
our Lord Jesus Christ, the great exemplar of the Church, as in 
many other things, so in this, give us an example ? He taught 
his little family of disciples the great truths of religion — he 
questioned them — he sang with them — he prayed with and for 
them. Does not this look like domestic worship ? Who can 
doubt that if he did these things it must be well pleasing in his 
sight when any head of a family is reading the Bible to his dis- 
ciples — for such are his children and servants — and when he is 
particularly calling their attention to religious truth, and ascer- 
taining their progress in knowledge by questioning them, and when 
he is singing psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs with them, 
and when he is devoutly leading their affections to God in prayer, 
and when he is making supplications for them at the throne of 
grace? Such a man is following in the footsteps of the good, 
from the Father of the faithful to the Author and Finisher 
of our faith. 

A GREAT PRINCIPLE. 

There certainly can be no more explicit statement than this : 
" To him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him 
it is sin." Jas. iv, 17. The question may be put directly to 
every man's conscience : Do you believe that it will be doing 
good to have stated family worship in your house ? Can it be 
possible that in all Christendom any member of any Church 
could be found who would answer, No! We can hardly con- 
ceive such a case. Thousands, even of the irreligious, would 
respond in the affirmative. 

But let us consider some of the good that is done by the 
observance of regular family worship. 

BENEFITS FROM FAMILY WORSHIP. 

I. For peace, happiness, and successful labor it is necessary 
that the members of a family live together in harmony. It is 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



2 9 



possible that a man and a woman and several children herd 
together without sympathy, without reciprocal tenderness, each 
standing off to himself, or, what is worse, each obstructing and 
irritating the other. Such a family is a most melancholy sight. 
Now, is it not desirable that they should be harmonized ? And 
can you conceive any thing which would more effectually bring 
them together than the reading of the word of God and the 
union of all the members in prayer? Would there not be estab- 
lished a chord of sympathy running through all hearts— all feeling 
that they were sinners dependent upon the mercy of God, all 
addressing the throne of the heavenly grace together? How well 
has it been said that " family prayer is the oil which removes 
friction and causes all the complicated wheels of the family to 
move smoothly and noiselessly ! " Try it, dear brother, and see 
if it be not so. 

2. It is beneficial to the servants of a household. Every man 
is responsible to God for the manner in which he rears his serv- 
ants. He must teach them the way to God. A Christian master 
may no more dare to neglect the spiritual interests of his serv- 
ants than a Christian parent may dare neglect those of his 
children. Family worship is eminently calculated to do them 
good. There is no language like that of the Bible for unin- 
structed souls. The- very words impress the truth upon the 
mind. The striking precepts and narratives of the Scriptures 
will go out with them to their work, and the mind will run 
upon these things, and the good word of God, which is the 
seed of truth, will spring up and bear fruits of righteousness. 
Your example will teach them to pray, and the fact that you 
are particular to call them in morning and night that they 
may share in your devotions, and that you pray for them earnestly 
and kindly, will make them love you and love your children, and 
serve you heartily, and not sulkily and grudgingly. This is a great 
point gained. A servant is always to be made to know his place, 
but he is not to be excluded from the Christian sympathies of the 
other members of the family. Prayerless brother, do you know 
why your servants are so faithless to you ; why they work so 
slowly, and neglect their work in your absence, and give you so 



3o 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



much trouble in a thousand ways? Is it not because you have 
never, by reading the Scripture to them, by prayer, by personal in- 
struction, shown them that you recognized such a thing as duty and 
such a thing as moral responsibility? In a word, have you not 
actually taught them to be faithless to their earthly master by your 
faithlessness to our heavenly Master ? They see you robbing God 
daily, and daily neglecting his work ; and he must be a stupid serv- 
ant who does not know that you are bound to be faithful to God 
by ties higher, stronger, and manifold more than those which bind 
him to you. Be assured that it would go far to restrain your serv- 
ants if you would make them feel that God is in your house, and 
that the whole family are daily commended to his special pro- 
tection. 

3. There are your children. As a Christian man you acknowledge 
your obligation to give them instruction in the things pertaining to 
godliness. There are portions of that instruction which you cannot 
give immediately ; such as are to be received from the minister of 
the Gospel. But this they receive in church, and perhaps you are 
very careful to see that they attend the preaching of the Gospel 
regularly. This is very right. And you put them in the way of 
deriving benefit from the Sunday-schools, the Bible-classes, and the 
catechisings. This is all very good ; but you must remember that 
there is a work to be done for your children 'which none but your- 
self can do. There is an influence exerted over your child, the 
whole power of which lies in your own hands. You do well to call 
in all aids ; but you must remember that they are only " aids." You 
are personally responsible for the accomplishment of that in your 
offspring which only yourself can achieve. The father's and the 
mother's signature must be set on the child. 

Now hear the word of God : " Therefore shall ye lay up these my 
words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon 
your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes. And 
ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou 
sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when 
thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt write 
them upon the door-posts of thine house, and upon thy gates : that 
your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, in the 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 3 1 

land which the Lord sware unto your fathers to give them, as the 
days of heaven upon the earth." Deut. xi, 18-21. These words cer- 
tainly must imply the duty of inculcating the doctrines and pre- 
cepts of our holy religion in the minds of your children. How can 
you do this so effectually as by maintaining regular family prayer, 
connected with the reading of the sacred Scripture ? On other oc- 
casions you take pains to correct some particular fault, or impress 
some particular truth, but in this service the general spirit of the 
Bible is breathed into your family; many a point of morals which 
you might never think of touching is brought by the Holy Spirit to 
bear upon the minds of your servants and children, which, although 
you may never know it, and they may never be aware of it, will be 
a secret yet powerful restraint in hours of sudden temptation. 

The headship of a family is a responsible position, surrounded by 
duties the discharge of which is often very painful. The man who 
is permitted, by God's providence, to hold this place, needs all the 
assistance he can derive from the grace of God to do his work faith- 
fully. He also does well to call around him every thing which can 
strengthen his authority over his household. Can we imagine any 
thing better calculated to effect this than his daily appearance in 
their midst as, in some sense, however subordinate, their priest, 
leading them, with the sacrifices of a broken spirit and a contrite 
heart, to the mercy-seat of God? Will they not rise from their 
knees with a more reverent regard for him who has been interceding 
in their behalf with the Father of their spirits ? No man knows the 
power of this feeling who has never lived in a family where domes- 
tic worship was conducted daily. Then, again, there are foibles and 
short-comings, and slighter obliquities of conduct which it is not 
always well to rebuke directly, but which may be most effectually 
corrected by the reading of an appropriate passage of Scripture, 
and by the spirit and tone of the prayers which are offered. This 
delicate correcting is in the hands only of those parents who main- 
tain family worship. 

Every Christian is supposed to be anxious that his children and 
his children's children should be the servants of God, and that the 
piety of the family should be handed down, through those who bear 
the name, to the last generation of man. Can this be done where 



32 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

family prayer is neglected ? Or, could any more certain means be 
devised for the propagation of Christianity than the faithful, unfail- 
ing discharge of this duty by Christian parents? Children would 
then be reared to believe that domestic arrangements were incom- 
plete until they embraced the worship of God. As a man's chil- 
dren colonized, and set themselves up in several families, the number 
of little domestic churches would be multiplied, there would be so 
many more points from which the light of religion would radiate, 
and every generation would find the number increasing until the 
earth should be filled with the knowledge of God. But what kind 
of expectation can a man have that his children will bring up their 
offspring in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, when they 
themselves have seen nothing at home of the beauties of domestic 
piety? 

Here, now, is the way to send one's influence down through all 
coming time and out to the ends of the earth. A man may be poor, 
he may not be learned, he may not be able to do much for the 
Church in a public and striking way, but at home and quietly he 
may be preparing his family for greater spiritual improvement when 
at church ; he may be rearing those who, when he is dead, will be 
mothers in Israel, will be embassadors for Christ, and will spread 
the leaven of our holy religion. If from the beginning of men the 
morning and evening worship of God had been observed in every 
family would there now be any heathen nations, any families that 
know not God ? Let neglecters of this great duty look at this fact : 
that but for the neglect of family prayer there would be no hea- 
thendom, with its dark places full of cruelty, no worship of stocks 
and stones, no calling upon idols, no pagan rites, no necessity for 
the great and laborious sacrifices of the missionary work ; a regular 
observance of daily family prayer would undoubtedly have pre- 
vented all these. Now if we would have the generations which suc- 
ceed us devoted to God let us hand down a high appreciation of 
this duty and privilege as an heirloom in our several families. 

4. There is another consideration, which ought to have weight 
with every man who is head of a family, and that is the good effect 
of this observance upon his own character and conduct. We do 
not now speak of the supplies of grace which he may expect to re- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



33 



ceive from his heavenly Father in prayer — very important as these 
are to him — but to the wholesome restraint upon his temper, his 
tongue, and his general behavior, which the bare fact that he con- 
ducts family worship will invariably exert. We need every restric- 
tion which can be thrown around us to keep us from evil, we need 
every constraint to do right which can be brought to bear upon our 
hearts, so great is the power of sin in us. Now no man can perse- 
vere in assembling his family daily, read the Scriptures to them, 
kneel down in their midst, confess his own sins and the sins of his 
family, and pray for forgiveness and for God's restraining, prevent- 
ing, and sanctifying grace — can twice a day in the presence of his 
family renew his vows to his Maker — and not feel that it increases 
the circumspection with which he regards his whole conduct as he 
goes in and out before them. Intelligent views of consistency would 
lead him to avoid many a thing which he now allows himself, and 
which may finally be ruinous to himself and a stumbling-block to 
others. 

It has been suggested that this is the very reason why some will 
not discharge this duty : because it does bind them to a more par- 
ticular life. Reader, can this be the case with you ? Examine your 
heart and answer to your God. If it be so, think how low, how un- 
becoming a Christian is such a reason as this. You neglect one 
duty that you may be free to neglect others, you daily relax the 
bands wherewith God would bind you to a holy life — you, who 
should be daily striving to be holy in heart and in outward conduct 
— you, who should be especially careful before your children and 
servants — you voluntarily omit that which you ought to do for them, 
in order that you may do that which will injure yourself. Look at 
this matter seriously. It is a debt you owe your family. You are 
unjust daily so long as you omit it. And see how one sin involves 
you in others. Trace out in all its bearings upon your heart and 
your life and upon the several members of your family the baleful 
influence of this neglect, and ask your immortal soul how it is to 
appear at the dread bar of God with all this guilt upon it. You 
admit, you feel that it would compel you to mend your ways if you 
commence family prayer. You would then be doing good to yourself 

and to every member of your family, and to the Church of the living 
3 



34 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

God and to the community in which you live. You know this. Now 
remember that the word of the Lord says, " To HIM THAT kxow- 
ETH TO DO GOOD, AND DOETH IT NOT, TO HIM IT IS SIN." 

5. No man can calculate the influence which domestic worship in 
the several families composing a church has upon the general pros- 
perity of that church. The preached word of God takes quicker 
and deeper root in the hearts of the members, the children are 
taught at home to listen to the Scriptures with a devout and in- 
quiring spirit, they have been so instructed in the word of truth 
that they more readily comprehend the minister, and so when the 
inhabitants of the dwellings of Jacob come up to the gates of Zion 
there is an humble and teachable spirit in them, and God shows 
them his glory. O, what an affliction it is to be the pastor of a con- 
gregation composed of unpraying families ! There is so little relish 
for Gospel truth, the ground is so hard, the minds of the people are 
so earthly and so worldly, so little accustomed to be raised in devo- 
tion, that there is no spirit of prayer in them, no habit of worship ; 
the responses are uttered so carelessly, or there are no responses at 
all, that the public service becomes a form and the soul of the min- 
ister sinks within him. How different is it in that congregation 
where the heads of families are faithful ! There the flame is fanned 
morning and night, and through the whole week is kept burning, 
and on the morning of the holy day the gathered fires from perhaps 
more than a hundred homes blaze together on the altar of our God. 
You may search Christendom through and not find a single church 
which is prosperous where family prayer is generally neglected — and 
you will not find one where a revival of religion did not follow a 
general increase of faithfulness in the discharge of this duty. 

The writer of this brief appeal was accustomed, once a month, to 
visit a congregation in a thriving manufacturing village. Endeav- 
oring, as he thought, to labor faithfully for the cause of Christ, it 
pained him to see such coldness throughout the church membership. 
Striving to account for it, he supposed, of course, that there must be 
some neglect of duty somewhere, and merely conjectured that it 
might be in this particular. The church was called together, the 
heads of families kindly questioned upon the subject, and it was 
found that only one member kept up domestic worship. An ap- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 35 

peal was made, and promises entered to take up this duty. These 
promises were fulfilled, and almost immediately a work of grace 
commenced in that church which resulted in the conversion of many 
souls, and increased prosperity in every department of the church's 
operations. Was this chance ? Can any man say so who believes 
the Bible? The Lord has said, " To him that ordereth his conver- 
sation aright will I show the salvation of God." Psa. 1, 23. 

In many of our meetings for prayer it is very desirable that lay 
members be able to take the lead. That pastor is peculiarly un- 
fortunate who has no members upon whom he can call to pray in 
social meetings. But there are many such ; and how can we account 
for it but by the fact that they do not pray with their families at 
home, and have not, therefore, acquired that preparation to aid their 
pastor and to help the church, which it is a shame for any layman, 
who has attained his majority, not to possess ? Here, then, is an 
important advantage to be derived from family prayer. As the com- 
mission of one sin is most likely to involve us in the commission of 
others, so the discharge of one duty is an excellent preparation 
for the discharge of others. 

6. In addition to the moral effect upon yourself, your children, 
your servants, and all who pertain to you, which is produced by the 
observance of this institution, there is one thought which should be 
uppermost in every truly Christian heart, and should crown every 
other consideration ; namely, that the blessing of God will be given 
in direct answer to prayer. This is a doctrine held universally by 
Christians as a part of their creed ; would that, with its consoling 
power, it were constantly cherished in the hearts of us all ! But 
this appeal is presumed to be addressed to such as hold this as an 
article of their faith. Can we be blessed too often or too much ? If 
the prayer of the closet is heard will not the prayer from the family 
altar ascend to him whose favor is life and whose loving-kindness is 
better than life ? And is any thing to be put in comparison with 
this? Is our belief in the presence, power, and mercy of God sin- 
cere and hearty ? Then why not come with united prayer to the 
Father of Mercies ? Is there any thing in the decent and devout 
assembling of our families to prevent our prayers from reaching the 
skies ? On the contrary, are there not many great and precious 



36 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

promises to those who engage in social prayer? Jesus has prom- 
ised to be present at such meetings. He has promised to hear 
prayer so offered ; and if we know and believe this, and yet 
fail to use any means of grace which we are sure our heavenly 
Father approves, how can we expect him to bless us in the use 
of any other? Does he? This question is most seriously pre- 
sented to the consideration of every reader who is the head of a 
family, or who is in such a position as to make it his duty to insti- 
tute domestic worship. 

When we refuse to discharge a certain duty, which will require 
some sacrifice of time or feeling for the purpose of obtaining the 
blessing of God, but go to him in the easiest way, to obtain his favor 
as cheaply as possible, will the heart-searching God hear us? Would 
you do so? Suppose I professed friendship to you, yet would never 
be found with you in company, would never come with my fam- 
ily to pay my respects to you, be ashamed or afraid to have my 
children go with me, but because you are rich and powerful, and 
may be of service to me, would go in the darkness of night to your 
house, profess great love for you there, but be unwilling to make 
the least sacrifice for your acquaintance and friendship — would you 
tolerate me? And yet, my brother, such is your position with God. 
You are willing to go to him in private, but will not take your 
family with you. Have you any right to expect that God will hear 
you ? Is ever the private prayer of that man answered who might, 
but will not, institute domestic worship under his roof? O, it may 
be that all the while you have been deceiving your own soul. Per- 
haps this will show you why your private prayer is so cold, so un- 
profitable. God will have none of you. You come offering the 
lame and the blind. You are afraid to pray earnestly, even in pri- 
vate, for you know that if God should answer your prayers and shed 
his love abroad in your heart you would be compelled to commence 
family worship, and this is exactly that thing which you are not 
willing to do. Your private prayer, then, is a ceremony, a mockery, 
and if so your whole religion must be shallow, if not empty and 
worthless. Have you ever known a man who, so far as you have 
been able to ascertain, has been earnest in the discharge of every 
public duty of church membership, and regular and ardent in private 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 37 

devotion, who neglected the great duty of family worship? Never, 
if your observation has been as ours. And is this chance ? Does 
it just happen so ? Verily it is of our God, who is a jealous God, 
who searches the heart and tries the reins of the children of men. 

And now, if this blessing be so inestimable — if it is to be sought 
every-where, in all the ways of his appointment — if the maintenance 
of family worship produces happy effects upon parents, children, and 
servants, preparing all for the better discharge of private and public, 
of home and church worship and service, perpetuating Christianity 
to future ages, while it begets a deepened spirituality in the Church 
at this present time — if it hallows the house and makes it the resi- 
dence of Jesus, the nursery of the Church, the type of heaven — and 
if the neglect of this duty sheds a blight upon all the members of 
the family, hardening their hearts, preparing the way for infidelity, 
loosing the family ties, and bringing down the daily curse of the 
great and glorious God who sits upon the circle of the heavens and 
sees all that is done upon earth ; how can you, Christian brother, 
fail to do that which brings such blessings and averts such curses ! 
How can you answer to your heavenly Father for involving your 
children in such destruction ? 

EXCUSES. 

It is easier to convince men that they are wrong than to persuade 
them to do right. But the Holy Spirit of God may be expected to 
accompany and bless every well-meant scriptural effort. In this 
sure and certain belief we proceed to examine the excuses which 
are generally made by those who neglect this duty. We call them 
excuses, as there is only one which partakes of the character of an 
objection to the institution itself; and the difficulty in all the cases 
supposed lies not in family prayer, but in the hearts of the persons 
concerned in this matter. 

FIRST EXCUSE. 
"I am too timid ! " There certainly is a difference in the temper- 
aments of men and women ; some have more nerve than others, 
while some are shrinking, timid, self-distrustful. And it is also a 
consoling scriptural truth that our heavenly Father requires of us ac- 



3 8 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

cording to what we have, and not according to what we have not. 
Your timidity may make it a greater cross to you ; but you know 
where your strength lies ; you know who promises more grace ; 
therefore if you are a delicate woman, whom God's providence has 
put over a family, although you may shrink — try ! Cast your care 
upon the Saviour. Look to him for direction ; and as your day so 
shall your strength be. Timid as you are, you would run into the 
midst of a host of armed men or into the midst of the flames to 
pluck your child from the jaws of death. Think a moment ; your 
child will probably be lost if there be no worship in your house. 
There are very few probabilities of any child being saved who is 
reared in a prayerless family. Will you not exert yourself to save 
your own offspring ? Shall not this thought make you dare to do 
all that you must, if not all that you can f 

SECOND EXCUSE. 

"It is so inconvenient." Are you the head of a family, and make 
this an excuse ? Can you not regulate the hours of rising and retir- 
ing, or eating, and of working? If not, what are you doing at 
the head of a family ? Your little child should take your place. 
What is meant by " inconvenience ? " Is it not fitting that in the 
morning God should have our thanks for the preservation of our 
lives through the night, and that fresh grace and strength should 
be sought for the approaching labors of the day ? " Inconvenient ! " 
Whose work and business does it not suit ? Yours ? Would you 
take such an excuse from your servant? Suppose your cook 
should tell you that it was " inconvenient " for her to prepare more 
than one meal for the family every day ; what would you say to 
her ? And yet you make such an excuse to your heavenly Mas- 
ter. You tell him that your family, by your direction or permis- 
sion, have entered upon such a course of business and pleasure that 
it will interfere with either the one or the other to maintain the 
daily worship of God. Are you really in earnest when you profess 
to believe that he will accept such an excuse ? Of course, the 
business or the pleasure is sinful ; for no harmless and holy habits, 
or proper pursuits, interfere with the service of the Lord. And 
now you ask God to excuse you from the discharge of a duty be- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



39 



cause it would be an interruption to your own sins or to the sins of 
your family. How can you appear before God with such, a senti- 
ment ! For this very purpose were you allowed and appointed to be 
the head of a family, that you might glorify God, and it is a base 
betrayal of a sacred trust if you continue to maintain the position 
and fail to perform the service. 

THIRD EXCUSE. 

" I have not time" This is similar to the last, but for depth of 
infidelity it is perfectly unsurpassed. We would almost as soon 
hear one whom we loved, or a member of our flock, use profane 
language. When the sentence comes from the lips of a professed 
follower of Christ it is an outrage on the common sense of man, 
and a most flagrant insult to the majesty of God. Have not time ! 
What ! And God made you, has preserved you, has given his only- 
begotten Son to redeem you, has given you life, intellect, the 
sources of profit and pleasure, and given time itself; time to be 
used in growing better, time which is only valuable as affording 
space for the preparation for eternity, time every instant of which 
belongs to him. Is it his service for which you have not time ? 
How has this unaccountable state of affairs come about ? What do 
you do with your time? As a member of the Church you ac- 
knowledge yourself bound to serve God, to consecrate all you have 
to him, that whether you eat or drink, or whatsoever you do, you 
are to do all to his glory, and that you have no right to pursue any 
employment which you do not believe consistent with the promo- 
tion of his cause in the earth. Your profession of religion involves 
all this. 

Now, how is it that you have not time ? Have you too much 
business? Then you are following the promptings of avarice ; as a 
mechanic, a merchant, or a professional" man, you are overtasking 
your powers. There is a point beyond which the mind cannot take 
such oversight of business as will make the business profitable. 

You have, therefore, undertaken to do what God does not desire, 
and upon which you cannot expect his blessing. You have under- 
taken it from covetous promptings, and may therefore expect him 
to blight it ; you have undertaken more than he has given you 



40 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



ability to perform, and may therefore expect to fail. There is be- 
fore you the prospect of ruin in your business, in your family, in 
your soul. You abandon the blessings of Heaven, and can only look 
that the blessings of earth will abandon you. Give up part of your 
business. Honor and safety bind you to do it. Do not say that 
you cannot support your family if you do. This is to have no faith 
in God. Will he not reward you better than the devil? Is not 
the whole earth his ? Has he not promised that he will honor 
those who honor him ? You are now laboring against the curse of 
God. You may have prosperity, but remember that the Bible says 
that the " prosperity of fools shall destroy them." It is no sign that 
God may not be cursing you because you are succeeding in busi- 
ness. This may be the very form of the curse. He may pour un- 
expected wealth into your lap, and this may bring luxury, worldli- 
ness, sin, shame, sorrow, to you, to your wife, and to your children. 
Is not real, permanent success to be expected rather by those who 
serve God than by those who forget his service and violate his com- 
mandments ? 

But have you not time ? How much does it require to conduct 
the service of God in your house, twice a day, in a decent manner ? 
Certainly not so much time as you must have imagined ; and then, 
when the service has been instituted, and the domestic regulation 
made, and every thing else bent to this, you will find that this is no 
interference with your business, and at the close of the day you will 
not feel as though you had lost a particle of time. On the con- 
trary, you will discover that regularity in this one item will help to 
make all the movements of your family systematic ; and system is 
absolutely necessary for the accomplishment of any thing valuable 
and for the management of large and complicated business opera- 
tions. But I address you on a higher ground. You are a professor 
of the religion of our Lord Jesus Christ. Is your profession a pre- 
tense ? or do you really believe the word of God ? — Do not be of- 
fended at these questions. Remember that they are naturally sug- 
gested to every thinking man by your own course. 

If you believe the word of God, then you must be persuaded that 
he hears prayers and answers them, and that his blessing is of inesti- 
mable value. You must believe that his blessing upon your efforts 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 4I 

is necessary to success, and will actually promote the advancement 
of your temporal affairs more surely than the best planning of the 
intellects, and the most industrious labor of the hands, of yourself, 
your wife, your children, and your servants. You must believe that 
he who can work only one hour a day under God's blessing will 
more surely succeed than he who rises early, sits up late, and eats 
the bread of carefulness while he is destitute of that blessing which 
maketh rich and leaveth no sorrow. Have you time to dig, to 
plow, to sow, to harrow, to reap, and not time to pray ? Time to 
plan, to invest, to buy, to sell, and to bargain, but not time to pray? 
Do you say to your children, your servants, your clerks, " Come, we 
have no time to eat to-day, the field is to be plowed, the crop is 
to be garnered, the ship to be laden, the letters to be written ; no 
time to eat to-day ! " Never have you been guilty of this folly ; 
but you have shown to your children, your servants, your clerks, 
that you believed you could succeed without God's blessing, that 
you could succeed against his curse, that your own right hand and 
strong mind would bring success, and that when the Lord God said, 
" Man shall not live by bread alone," he uttered what you believed 
to be contrary to fact. My brother, you need God's blessing ; you 
must have it. If not convinced of this, the first clearing of the 
ground which is to be dug for the foundation of the superstructure 
of a Christian character is yet to be made. You are yet a blind 
worldling ; a worldling in the Church of Christ, growing worse in 
your own condition, and doing more harm to others. 

Not time If You who can spend an hour in the morning looking 
over the newspapers, a half hour in the middle of the day in the 
angry discussion of party politics, some time in the evening for a 
trashy novel — time to take pleasure and to make money, time to 
eat too much, time to sleep too much, time, perhaps, for a concert, for 
a useless visit, for extraordinary carefulness in dressing, for unchari- 
table and unprofitable conversation — you, a Christian, a member of 
the Church, a husband, a father, a master, a dependent upon God, a 
candidate for eternal honors, you have not time to spend fifteen min- 
utes in the morning, and fifteen minutes in the evening, reading that 
word which is able to make you and yours wise unto salvation, and 
praying for strength, wisdom, forgiveness, and holiness, and offering 



42 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



your thanks and praises to Him who spares you and crowns your 
life with loving-kindness ! No time ! Have you time to die, my 
brother? No, you have no time to die. It will be a great incon- 
venience to you, a great interruption, and for this reason more than 
any other : that you have not " set your house in order." Never, 
then, so long as you have time to eat your breakfast and your sup- 
per, make this excuse. Your wife, your children, your servants do 
not believe it. You do not — GOD does not. In the eyes of all these 
you are acting as does not become a member of the Church of our 
Lord Jesus Christ. 

FOURTH EXCUSE. 

" My family is too small!' The smallest family must consist of 
two individuals. Is that the case with you ? If so, how interesting 
a family may yours be ! Perhaps you have just married. Is there 
any better time to cease from all evil and to begin to do all the 
good you can? Your young wife is ready now to pray to God with 
you daily. Go to her in manly humility and tell her that the days 
of your courtship were pleasant enough, but that now the days of 
responsibility as well as of higher happiness have come ; that it is 
an untoward world, and you are exposed to constant temptation 
among men ; that you need all the assistance you can have from 
her love and God's grace to save you from ruin and to make you 
faithful to your marriage vows. Her heart is toward you now. 
This very day is the time to begin. The longer you postpone the 
more difficult will the work be ; and remember, that it was a wrong 
you did that wife you love when you led her to the altar to bind 
her to your fortunes with indissoluble ties, and yet had not resolved 
to consecrate to God the house to which you took her. Now, 
parallel with your lives, rule the bright line of religion. If you live 
to be old it will be a delightful thought that you have always had 
God in your house. It will brighten and strengthen the golden 
chain that binds you, and the incense from the altar of your home 
will float through all the chambers a sweet savor of God. 

Perhaps your family was once large, and spread out like a glorious 
tree, but the storms have visited you and torn limb after limb away, 
leaving you as you began life, two again, but lonely and stricken. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



43 



Go to the mercy-seat. Humble yourself before your Maker. You 
certainly cannot complain that he has taken your children if you 
were rearing them amid the impieties of an unprayerful abode. 
From the evil to come God hath taken them. You refused to do a 
father's duty, and God refused you a father's pleasure. But go 
unto him. He has stricken, and he will heal you. 

Or, it may be that you have lived until your children have grown 
to maturity and colonized. They have set themselves up in families, 
and you and your wife, in your old age, are left to finish life alone. 
How strange and good are the ways of God ! He spared your chil- 
dren, although you were not rearing them for his glory. Perhaps 
this thought has affected some one of your sons ; or, in spite of your 
neglect, the grace of God has appeared unto him, and he has reared 
an altar at his hearth-stone. Let his pious example rebuke you, 
and " go and do likewise." But have two, three, or four of your 
children married, made homes, and yet found no place for the Lord 
their God? See how you are propagating irreligion and infidelity! 
In your life-time you can see the stream of your evil example widen- 
ing. Let your few last days be spent with the wife of your youth 
in prayer together that God may forgive you, that he may help you 
to devote all of life that is left to the honor and glory of his name. 
Pray for your children. Lead them adult where they should have 
gone infants. Go to your sons. Confess your evil. Tell your re- 
pentance, even if with bitter tears, and beg them as they dread a 
remorseful old age, as they dread the curses of their God and the 
curses of their children, to avoid that neglect which is planting the 
pathway of your last faltering footsteps full of thorns. 

Under whatever circumstances your family may be small, there 
yet remains to be quoted that memorable saying of the Saviour, 
" Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I 
in the midst of them." Matt, xviii, 20. Here is reason enough, in- 
ducement enough, to make an altar in the smallest house. 

Mr. Howard, the philanthropist, never neglected the duty of 
family prayer, even though there was but one, and that one his do- 
mestic, to join in it ; always declaring that where he had a tent 
God should have an altar. This was the case not only in England, 
but in every part of Europe which they visited together, it being 



44 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

the invariable practice wherever, and with whomsoever he might 
be, to tell Tomasson to come to him at a certain hour, at which, 
well knowing what the direction meant, he would be sure to find 
him in his room, the door of which he would order him to fasten ; 
when, let who would come, nobody was admitted till his devotional 
exercise was over. " Very few," says the humble narrator, " knew 
the goodness of this man's heart." 

FIFTH EXCUSE. 

" My family is so large, and we have so many visitors" So large ? 
Of whom does your family consist? I presume your wife, your 
children, your servants, and perhaps some relatives or connections. 
Yours is a large family, according to your statement. Then you 
have more children and more servants than many of your neighbors. 
That is to say, God has blessed you more. You have had children 
given you, and their lives have been continued. You have suc- 
ceeded in business, or inherited wealth, and thus have been able to 
increase the number of your servants. You have filled your roomy 
house with the comforts of life and made it a delightful visiting- 
place, so that you have much company and good cheer in your 
pleasant home. Who hath given you these things? Who could 
take them away in a twinkling of an eye ? And is He to have no 
daily expressions of gratitude for his munificence to your house- 
hold? 

Many children, servants, and friends ! See how many must be 
deeply injured in their spiritual interests if you neglect this duty, 
how many to rise up against you in judgment, how many to per- 
petuate your example, and to carry the stream of irreligion down 
to unborn generations through so many channels. See how many 
may be blessed by a proper, humble effort on your part to do that 
which by honor and conscience you are bound to do. If you had 
but one child it would be worth a life's devotion to lead that child 
to God, as his growing influence might widen and deepen as ages 
roll on ; but to train a number for the Lord, this is a glorious work, 
which should certainly not be abandoned, but rather certainly prose- 
cuted, because it is so great a work. The physician might just as 
well abandon his practice because it is so large, the military leader 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



45 



his army because it is so large, the minister of the Gospel his con- 
gregation because it is so large, as might you surrender your family 
to irreligion because it is so large. It is not an inducement suffi- 
cient to lead you to abandon labor for the maintenance of the 
family, for procuring bread and raiment, because it is so large. 
Every addition to it ought to stimulate you to be more diligent in 
business and more fervent in spirit. The larger your family the 
more need there is of religion in the house to control and regulate, 
to modify the interchange of influences, to suppress those outbursts 
of passion which, where so many interests are concerned, may jar 
the little community to its center. Your family may no more do 
without religion than your town, your country, the world. And if 
religion prevail in your midst you will find your family all anxious 
to have family prayer ; but, whether or not, you are bound to dis- 
charge your duty in this respect. " But, the visitors ! I could do 
well enough, perhaps, with my own family, but the service might be 
disagreeable to my visitors ! " Is it possible that you will suffer any 
other man to come into your family and regulate or derange your 
own affairs ? Or are you not bound to exert a wholesome influence 
over all who put themselves within your reach ? Is there not to be 
one law for " him that dwelleth with you " and for " the stranger 
within your gate ? " You are bound to exert a perpetual influence 
to the extent of your power. The best labor for Christ is the con- 
stant, faithful, trustful discharge of every duty. Here is an illus- 
tration : 

A gentleman from England brought a letter of introduction to a 
gentleman in America. The gentleman was of accomplished mind 
and manners, but an infidel. The gentleman to whom he had brought 
letters of introduction, and his lady, were active Christian philan- 
thropists. They invited the stranger to make their house his home, 
and treated him with every possible attention. Upon the evening 
of his arrival, just before the usual hour for retiring, the gentleman, 
knowing the peculiarity of his friend's sentiments, observed to him 
that the hour had arrived in which they usually attended family 
prayers; that he should be happy to have him remain and unite 
with them, or, if he preferred, he could retire. The gentleman in- 
timated that it would give him pleasure to remain. A chapter of 



46 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

the Bible was read, and the family all knelt in prayer, the stranger 
with the rest. In a few days he left this hospitable dwelling and 
embarked on board a ship for a foreign land. In the course of three 
or four years, however, the providence of God again led him to the 
same dwelling. But, O, how changed ! He came the happy Chris- 
tian, the humble man of piety and prayer. In the course of the 
evening's conversation he remarked that when, on the first evening 
of his visit, he knelt with them in family prayer, it was the first 
time in many years that he had bowed the knee to his Maker. This 
act brought to his mind such a crowd of recollections, it so vividly 
reminded him of a parent's prayers, which he had heard at home, 
that he was entirely bewildered. His emotion was so great that he 
did not hear one syllable of the prayer which was uttered, from 
the commencement to its close. But God made this the instru- 
ment of leading him from the dreary wilds of infidelity to the 
peace and joy of piety. * 

Now these good people, with whom the accomplished infidel tar- 
ried, might have prayed very earnestly in their chamber for his 
conversion, and he might and probably would have gone away un- 
arrested ; it was the family prayer that overpowered him with rec- 
ollections which eventually brought him to the cross. Recollec- 
tions of what? Of the prayers of his parents. Even the domestic 
worship of his new American friends would have been powerless had 
not his youth been accustomed to a solemn service at home. What 
encouragement is this to parents ! Having sown the seed of truth 
in the minds of my children, when I am sleeping in the grave the 
breath of prayer on another continent may make the truth shoot 
up and grow, and bring forth fruit for God and man. 

We cannot pass from this topic without calling the attention of 
those who have recently married, and those who have small families, 
to the difficulty which they will experience if they put off this duty 
until their families have grown much larger. And see, also, how 
ready is the evil heart of unbelief in offering excuses. One has too 
small a family, another too large. " The heart is deceitful above 
all things." 

* Abbott's Mother at Home. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 4 y 

SIXTH EXCUSE. 

"My family will not join me" Have you tried them? If not, 
how can you slander your family by representing them as so hea- 
thenish ? How can you know that they would not ? Are you not 
really making a misrepresentation an excuse for your own unwill- 
ingness? Perhaps they are daily looking for you to begin, hoping, 
solicitous, ready most joyfully to receive the announcement that 
" Father is going to have prayers in the family ! " They are unwill- 
ing to speak on the subject, but God's Spirit may now be striving 
with them, and if the altar be set up in the house they may give 
their hearts to God speedily; if not, they may be lost ; and at whose 
hands will their blood be required ? 

Perhaps there is no special anxiety upon the part of any member 
of your family to engage in the discharge of this duty, for the very 
reason that you have given your family no religious instruction ; but 
the very moment you propose it the propriety will be so apparent 
that they may all yiel'd at once ; and if the domestic arrangements 
do not favor it now your wishes in the matter will be consulted, 
and you will soon find every thing moving on with a beautiful regu- 
larity. By all means first roll the burden from your own shoulders. 
The responsibility is upon you, as the head of the family. Try it. 
Let your family know, before they go down to the grave, that they 
have had this blessed opportunity. 

But let us look at it in another light. Are you not the head of 
the family ? Does not the government of the household devolve 
upon you ? Our whole appeal has been based upon that supposi- 
tion. Who will not join you ? Your wife ? Appeal to her by the 
vows she made so solemnly at the bridal altar to love, honor, and 
obey you, by her own spiritual necessities, by the moral exposure of 
your offspring, and if the mother-heart in her has not been seared 
over with a hot iron she will do all she can to facilitate your plans. 
Will not your children ? Are they young? Bend them doivn to it, 
as you must answer for it at the judgment seat. Are you a mem- 
ber of the Church? Then you profess to be of Abraham's seed by 
faith. Hear what the Lord says of Abraham : " Abraham shall 
surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the 
earth shall be blessed in him, for I know him, that he will command 



4 8 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

his children and his household after him." Gen. xviii, 18, 19. Here 
is the reason, under God's blessing, of Abraham's remarkable 
growth : he commanded his children. Can you not command your 
children ? Are they u too hard " for you ? Think how you bring 
shame upon yourself by this admission. You, a man, a father, and 
cannot make your little children do as you will ! Are you not 
ashamed to look them in the face ? To be a little child's inferior 
in governing power ! To let your child rule you ! How can you 
endure it? Bear plain speech in this matter. If it really be so that 
you cannot make your children do as you wish you are unworthy 
the position and name of father. You have assumed a post whose 
duties you cannot discharge. 

But you ;;««/ command your children. Honor, righteousness, 
self-respect, society, the weal of your offspring, the will of your 
God, enjoin it. Now is the time. Do not put it off another day. 
Undertake the conquest. Summon to your aid all your intellectual, 
moral, spiritual, and physical resources. Leave off every thing else. 
Lay siege. Nothing now can be so important to you upon earth 
as to gain the supremacy which your Maker intended that you 
should have in your own family. 

Perhaps your children are almost men and women, and yet, ac- 
cording to your showing, they are ungovernable. O, what a mel- 
ancholy picture is this ! But the blame lies with you. You have 
given them daily aid, by your example, until they have grown strong 
enough to override all rule and authority. They saw you rebelling 
against the authority of your Father. Your neglecting to conduct 
family worship was so ungrateful to Him to whom you are bound 
by ten thousand times ten thousand stronger, higher, purer ties, 
than those which bind your children to you, that they were daily 
rooted and grounded in all ingratitude. I hardly know what to say 
to you ; but you ought to have worship in your family. Perhaps 
God will pardon Eli ; he may also move the hearts of Hophni and 
Phinehas, and convert and save them. If he do not none other 
can. He is your only refuge. Fly to him ! Confess your fault to 
your children and to the Father of your spirit, and he may pardon 
and bless. 

Perhaps some other relative is resident with you, and a hinder- 



FOR E VER Y FIRESIDE. 49 

ance to the discharge of this duty. Whoever it may be, under what- 
ever circumstances that person may live in your house, if he persevere 
in teaching your children to rebel against you and against God, cast 
him out. He is a snake at the cradle, an adder on the hearth-stone. 
Cast him out. To no other human being do you owe as much 
as to your wife and children. By all a husband's and a fa- 
ther's honor you are bound to fling from your family circle what- 
ever element of discord or irreligion may have crept into it. But 
that relative may be rich, and the family expectations look that 
way ! And you have really made up your mind to sell your chil- 
dren to hell for gold ? Is this the plain English of the language 
you use ? Has it come to this? Baser and baser still! Achan's 
wedge of gold and Babylonish garment ! At whatever sacrifice of 
feeling or of property you must give your family to God. You 
cannot prosper without that blessing which descends from him, 
and whosoever and whatsoever stands between you and that bless- 
ing is a foe ; treat him or it as a foe ! Stand on earth, as at the 
judgment-bar you must stand, at the head of your family. Lead 
them to God. Guide, direct, control them. Strength will be given 
for this purpose. Your heavenly Father will assist ; you will suc- 
ceed, and you will have honor on earth and honor in heaven.. 

SEVENTH EXCUSE. 

" I am ashamed to begin. I shall be ridiculed if I do" But if you 
do not, hear what God says : " I will laugh at your calamity ; 
I will mock when your fear cometh ; when your fear com- 
eth as a desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirl- 
wind ; when distress and anguish cometh upon you." Prov, 
i, 26, 27. Here, then, is your choice, if it be true, as you say, that 
your fellow-men will ridicule you. You must resolve to bear that, 
or make up your mind to endure that ridicule of your Maker. 
Choose now ! Who shall laugh at you ; man or God ? But who 
will ridicule you? Certainly not good men. And suppose bad 
men do : they ridicule you now in their own hearts, if not openly. 
They think, and perhaps behind your back they say, " He is a 
pretty member of the Church ! Professes to be a servant of God, 
promised to bring up his children religiously, and all that, and yet 



50 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

has no family prayer ; is no better at home than we are ! " This is 
what they say. Now, you have learned very little of the workings 
of the carnal mind, which is enmity to God, if you have not discov- 
ered that sinners will slander and ridicule the people of God, no 
matter whether they do right or wrong. But this is also certainly 
true : that when we do right and they ridicule us with their lips 
their own hearts are compelled to do honor to the propriety and 
consistency of our course, and we are sustained under the ridicule 
by our consciousness of rectitude ; but when they ridicule our in- 
consistencies our consciences join in the cry, and we are condemned 
within and without. 

The fact that there is so much irreligion in the world as to make 
some profess to think that it is ridiculous to hold family prayer 
should incline you, as a Christian man, to its regular observance. 
The maxims of the world afford no guide to you — they are not your 
standard. You are to live as " seeing Him that is invisible." 
You are to be " looking unto Jesus." That reputation of 
which we should be most careful is our reputation in the skies. 
But your reputation as a Christian man upon earth is best secured 
by doing all that your profession binds you to do. Saints and sin- 
ners expect you to do so ; you may have adopted a wrong profes- 
sion, but, right or wrong, the world expects you to maintain a con- 
sistent observance of its duties. And then there is a day coming 
when all opinion shall lie in the clear light of the eternal world. 
You will meet your neighbors at the judgment-seat. What then 
can he do for you whose sneer drove you from a manifest duty, led 
you to exclude God from your house and rear your family in irre- 
ligion ? " Whosoever," says the Saviour, " shall confess me before 
men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. 
But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny be- 
fore my Father which is in heaven." Matt, x, 32, 33. What man 
so much denies the Lord before men as he who, for fear of ridicule, 
neglects domestic worship and is willing to have his family ranked 
among the openly irreligious? God threatens to " pour out his 
fury " upon such a family ; but the man plainly shows that he con- 
siders this nothing when compared with the opposition and ridicule 
of the god of this world. 



FOR E VER V FIRESIDE. 



51 



EIGHTH EXCUSE. 
" I do not know how to begin." Would you if you did know ? It 
is easy to find a way after one has found a will. May we humbly 
make a few suggestions ? This evening — yes, this very evening, 
the sooner the better, no time for delay now — after every thing is 
cleared away in your dining-room, and some of the members of the 
family, or perhaps all, are sitting sewing, reading, or conversing, go 
from your closet, where you shall have been humbly beseeching Him 
to give strength and wisdom for the work, sit down in the midst of 
your family and lay God's holy word before you. Say to those 
around you, " I will be glad if you will lay aside your work for a 
few minutes, that I may read to you a chapter out of the Bible." 
Then read the first Psalm, or any other portion of the Scripture. 
Then say, " Let us pray." Kneel down. All the others will kneel 
also. If not, no matter now. Go on. If you cannot trust your- 
self to pray in your own language, because the scene is so new 
and so solemn, and your heart is surcharged with a swelling 
tide of emotion, in a distinct, and slow, and devout manner repeat 
the Lord's Prayer. When you shall have risen from your knees 
say : " We will have family prayer again to-morrow morning." 
Then go back to your closet and thank your Father in heaven for 
the strength given you, and while you are pouring out your spirit 
for yourself and for your loved ones they will be thinking upon the 
vision which so unexpectedly has passed before their eyes. You 
need not be there to make comment. God's Holy Spirit is there. 
The act, and the manner in which it was done, will do more to bring 
your family into measures than a score of homilies. And to-night 
you will have sweeter sleep than has visited your conscience- 
stricken soul now these many months, perhaps many years. To- 
morrow morning take up the Bible as a matter of course, read an- 
other portion of Scripture, strive to pray in your own language, 
and if you find yourself at a loss for language, conclude 
the service with the Lord's Prayer. This prayer ought to be 
in your devotions, whether long or short, whenever you pray with 
your family. After a few times the family will understand that devo- 
tion is a regular part of the day's work, your diffidence will have 
measurably passed away, and you can then examine the subject and 



52 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

ascertain what arrangements best suit the family and what aids you 
require. The less parade in this work the better. Perhaps new 
difficulties would be arrayed against you if you went round your 
family, ascertaining the views of each member, before you began. It 
would be well to consult with your wife. She will remove obstruc- 
tions and aid you by her prayers ; and then, " a work begun is a 
work half done." Only try ; you must succeed ; and success here 
will be so delightful. If difficulties rise up before you, do not con- 
sider them. Shut your eyes, put your hand in the hand of your 
heavenly Father and go forward. The mist will dissipate as you 
advance, and you shall soon stand under the light of his counte- 
nance. 

NINTH EXCUSE. 

" The service will soon become a dull and useless form." Perhaps 
it will ; but that will be your fault. It need not become so. If you 
maintain in your own heart and cultivate in your children a sense 
of God's constant presence, of your own corruption and great spir- 
itual necessities, of the glory of heaven, of the horrors of hell, of 
the power of the atonement, and of the love of your Lord Jesus Christ, 
it will not become a dull service. This is no argument against family 
devotion, any farther than it is an argument against all religious 
service. Fasting, private prayer, the reading of the Scripture, at- 
tendance upon divine service, may all become dull and useless forms, 
if our hearts be not ardently engaged therein. There is no part of 
the service of the Lord which will not be dull to a stupid, carnal, 
and unloving heart. It is well, then, that we go to the family 
altar with our spirits prepared to offer humble and acceptable sacri- 
fices. 

Perhaps there are many other excuses which are offered by those 
who neglect this duty ; we are striving to expose the insufficiency 
of those with which we are acquainted, but we are sure that, what- 
ever others there may be, they are traceable to a heart that is not 
right with God ; and the man who offers them may well ask him- 
self, Am I devoted to God? Am I seeking to be conformed to 
all his will ? 

There is one other to which we must make some reply. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



53 



TENTH EXCUSE. 

" I have not the ability." The first thing to be said of this is that 
most probably it is insincere. You do not mean what you say. 
You use it to repel the minister, or the pious friend, or the Spirit of 
God, or the voice of conscience. If you knew that through the 
church of which you are a member it were circulated that you were 
so stupid, so ignorant, that you could not read a passage in the 
Bible and repeat the Lord's Prayer, you would be indignant. And 
yet, so far as intellectual and physical ability is concerned, this is 
all that is required. You have deceived yourself if you have sup- 
posed that an elegant discourse is to be delivered daily in the pres- 
ence of God. Oh, no ! To tell your sins before him, to humble 
yourself under his mighty hand, to call upon his excellent name, 
praising him and asking for wisdom, strength, and grace, for your- 
self and for your family — this is all that is required of you. In this 
service, of course, the Lord, who gives you all good things, expects 
you to exert yourself to your best ability, to render it a pleasing, 
profitable, and acceptable work ; but he does not require you to do 
better than you can. You are not to compare yourself with your 
ministers, or with some other members of your church who have 
been engaged in this blessed work for years. Who told you that 
you had to pray as well as they ? Begin ; go forward ; you will 
do better and better. Your prayers will be more devotional. 

Remember that you are not praying to your family and the visit- 
ors who are present, but for them, and to God, and that when God 
passes judgment upon prayer he does not consider the arrange- 
ment of the language, but the state of the heart and the meaning 
of the mind. He searches your intentions. God and man will 
acquit you if you do your best ; by which is meant, not to make 
the most show, but come as humbly, reverently, confidingly, as pos- 
sible. You would find ability to pray the governor of the Com- 
monwealth to reprieve or pardon your son if he were condemned to 
death ; have you no ability to ask God to have mercy upon your 
children ? O, brother, when the periled condition of those children 
becomes apparent to you, and your own danger lies open to view, 
you will fly to God ; you will gather your little ones about his foot- 
stool. In broken language, and in tears, and in groans, you will 



54 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

pray, you will wrestle, you will agonize. God will hear you, night 
and morning, calling upon him for their salvation. You will not let 
him go. Your children will lie on your heart, and in private, and 
in the great congregation, and at home, you will offer strong cries 
and tears for their salvation. You will not think of language then. 
Nor will you when you see your child dying, when you fling your- 
self upon your knees beside that loved one so rapidly passing away, 
and yet unconverted, and all conscious of approaching doom. O, 
when you mingle your cries with the cries of that trembling spirit 
you will not think of words ; God and the Saviour, Heaven, Hell 
and Immortality will set your soul on fire and open your mouth 
and fill you with arguments. 

This night may be the last time you shall have opportunity to 
pray with your child. He may be dead to-morrow — she may have 
passed from you. Will you offer at the bar of God the excuse, " I 
had no ability for the work? " Have you ever tried? If not, how 
can you know that you have no ability ? You assert positively con- 
cerning that of which you have no knowledge. Is this right ? By 
so saying you imply that the Lord has laid upon you a burden 
which you are not able to bear. You thus dishonor your Lord 
and damage his cause among men. Do not say that you have not 
ability. You, a shrewd farmer, mechanic, merchant, professional 
man, with such a loose tongue for common things, no ability to 
pray? Beware, my brother. " Be not deceived. God is not mocked. 
Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he reap." Go on ! Sow irre- 
ligion in your family, and you shall reap their ruin ; and when you 
look over the only harvest-field in the measureless future you will 
have whatever satisfaction there may be in the thought, " My care- 
lessness, negligence, sloth, inactivity, unbelief, did all this! " 

SUGGESTIONS. 

Having endeavored to represent the character of family worship 
as a duty and a privilege, bringing blessings to individuals, to the 
domestic circle and to the Church of God, and having endeavored 
to show the futility of the excuses which are made for its non-ob- 
servance, if the Lord has blessed the effort, and any reader, really 



FOR E VER Y FIRESIDE. 5 5 

desiring to do all that is right, has resolved to set about this good 
work, it may be expected that some suggestions will be offered in 
regard to the best methods of making this an interesting and profit- 
able service. What may be said on this subject may be of use not 
only to those who intend to begin, but also to those who have long 
continued to attempt the discharge of this important duty. The 
greatest part of our work is accomplished if any shall have been in- 
duced to take up the cross and to follow Jesus in this particular ; 
the details of the manner, however, are not unimportant. Much 
will depend upon the heart being engaged, and much must be left 
to circumstances. It might not be best for all to do alike, even if 
this were possible. A right heart and a sound discretion will sug- 
gest the best methods to each individual concerned. 

1. Family worship should be daily, and, if practicable, not less 
than twice a day. Some of the devout have called their families to 
worship God as often as to meals — that is, thrice each day. Others 
have this regulation for the Sabbath only. It certainly cannot be 
too often to require our children and servants to assemble for praise 
and prayer every morning and every night. " When thou liest 
down and when thou risest up " is the language of the Scripture. 
We say every morning and every night. The service will lose its 
power and its beauty if interrupted by trivial circumstances. There 
can scarcely be any thing to justify a departure from the rule. If 
omitted to-day for one reason, to-morrow it may be for another, 
and so it may finally be broken. Our families should see that we 
regard it as all-important, that no business is so pressing and no 
pleasure so fascinating as to drive or draw us from the worship 
of God. The moral force of this service will then be exerted 
upon their minds. If company come in just at our hour of serv- 
ice let them be requested to wait for us a season or to join in our 
prayers. 

In the morning the temptation will be to run off as soon as we 
can do our business. Let us remember that unless God's blessing 
go with us we may be running into destruction. This were indeed 
to be absorbed in Mammon worship, if our anxiety to be engaged 
in the activities of a gainful business should prevent the worship of 
the Lord our God. It is recorded in the memoir of the excellent 



56 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

Philip Henry that he was not willing, unless the necessity were ur- 
gent, that any should go from his house in the morning before family 
worship ; upon such an occasion he would remind his friends, that 
prayer and provender never hinder a journey.* It is not time lost, 
but time redeemed, that which we spend with our families in prayer. 
In the evening the interruption may be from company. If it happen 
to be an unexpected visitor, let him, as we have intimated, be invited 
into our home sanctuary to kneel among the worshipers there. It 
is a delicate compliment to the visitor which every well-bred person 
will appreciate, f But all those entertainments and companies 
which conflict with this domestic duty must have no place in a 
Christian's house. If you have had difficulties on that score you can 
be relieved at once by laying down the law that your family are not 
to have such evening entertainments, nor to go to such, as will keep 
them from the altar. It is to be a law of the house. If this 
regulation obtained universally through the Churches there 
would be a manifest improvement in the morals of society. There 
are certain kinds of reunions now in vogue which, while they do 
much toward the silent injury of the soul, are patronized by com- 
municants of the Church. If the law we have stated were adopted 
the line between the Church and the world would be more distinct, 
and the example of the disciples of our Lord would not be used to 
give currency and boldness to the frivolities which dissipate and 
weaken the mind and unfit for the public and private duties of re- 
ligion. Let it be understood among us that nothing is to be thought 
of for a moment which is to interfere with our family worship ; that 
with the regularity of the sun's rising and setting we and those 
whom we love are to be found bowing before the Father of mercies. 



* Life and Times of Philip Henry, p. 118. 

t "When George IV. was in Ireland, as we find recorded by the Rev. Dr. Sprague, he told 
Lord Roden that on a particular morning he would breakfast with him. He accordingly came, 
bringing with him two or three of the nobility, and happened to arrive just as his lordship and 
family were assembled for domestic worship. Lord Roden, being informed that his royal guest 
had arrived, went to the door, and with every token of respect conducted him into the house. 
Then, turning to the king, he said, ' Your majesty will not doubt that I feel highly honored by 
this visit, but there is a duty which I have not discharged this morning, which I owe to the King 
of kings — that of performing domestic worship ; and your majesty will be kind enough to ex- 
cuse me while I retire with my household and attend to it.' ' Certainly,' replied the king, ' but I 
am going with you ; ' and he immediately rose and followed him into the hall, where the family 
were assembled, and, taking his seat in an old arm-chair, remained during the family devotion." 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 57 

2. This duty will be more easily and profitably discharged if a 
certain place in the house and a certain hour of the day be set 
apart and consecrated to family worship. After the adoption of this 
general rule it will, of course, remain with each family to decide 
what room and what hour. Such time and place should be selected 
as will be most probably free from interruption. Having observed 
many arrangements the author of this treatise adopted the custom 
of having prayers with his family immediately after breakfast and 
immediately after dinner, the latter meal being at six o'clock. It 
was found that before breakfast the servants, especially the cook, 
could not, without great inconvenience, be present at the service. 
As the meal concluded the bell was rung, and every member of the 
family was expected to come into the dining-room. In the even- 
ing, especially in towns and cities, there are so many public meet- 
ings which some member of the family desires to attend, many of 
which are held to a late hour, that for their sakes family prayer 
should be early. Others of the family become engaged in study or 
in work, the children are soon sleepy, and if the service be not 
conducted in the beginning of the evening they will necessarily be 
absent. Then, when we are freshest, when every one of us can be 
there, we make the room in which we are daily fed by His hand to 
be the place of praises and of prayers ; reading the Bible is, as it 
were, but a part of the daily meal, and the first and the last strength 
of the day is devoted to the worship of the Giver of every good and 
every perfect gift. This arrangement has been found best for the 
family of the present writer, and may be suitable to others. In 
stating it, however, he must not for a moment be supposed to be 
laying down a general rule. These are merely suggestions. 

3. Every member of the family should, on all occasions, be pres- 
ent, unless unavoidably detained. Children and apprentices * and 
servants should be compelled ; even as Abraham commanded— wot 
exhorted, entreated, invited — his children and his household after 
him ; and others should be made to know that a prompt and re- 
spectful attention to this domestic duty is requisite for a continu- 
ance with us. In many families the children are allowed to be ab- 



* This was written when there were apprentices. The institution has disappeared. Alas ! 



58 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

sent, to be asleep, to be playing, during family prayer. This must 
be prevented. Nothing but sickness should be an excuse. Very 
frequently, too, no provision is made for the presence of the serv- 
ants. They are allowed to be present, but the head of the family 
has no sign by which he shows them that he expects them to be 
there ; and when they are absent they are not questioned on the 
subject, and when they appear they are allowed to stand or sit wher- 
ever they can find a place.* All this is wrong ; it takes much from 
the moral beauty and effectiveness of the service ; and our domes- 
ties are thus informed that we regard them as spectators of our 
piety, not as partakers of like precious faith with us. And what 
lesson must many of our apprentices in the towns, and our servants 
in the country, learn from the fact that they are left in the shops 
and in the fields while we go in to pray with the other members of 
the family ? Does it not show them that we are unwilling to give 
unto the Lord the few pence which they are able to earn in that 
brief time? And where is the consistency of such piety? How 
are we to answer for these souls? Family prayer is for the whole 
family, and all should be taught to unite in the singing and in the 
prayers. 

A pious tradesman, conversing with a minister on family worship, 
related the following instructive circumstances respecting himself: 

" When I first began business for myself I was determined, 
through grace, to be particularly conscientious with respect to 
family prayer. Accordingly I persevered for many years in the de- 
lightful practice of domestic worship. Morning and evening every 
individual of my family was ordered to be present ; nor would I al- 
low my apprentices to be absent on any account. In a few years 
the advantages of these engagements manifestly appeared ; the 
blessings of the upper and nether springs followed me ; health and 
happiness attended my family and prosperity my business. At 
length, such was the rapid increase of trade and the importance of 
devoting every possible moment to my customers, that I began to 
think whether family prayer did not occupy too much of my time 

* What is to be done with the servant who belongs to a " religion " which does not allow him 
or her to be present at family prayer ? In answer, take this question : Ought a respectable 
Christian admit into his family any one who cannot unite in worship with him and his family ? 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



59 



in the morning. Pious scruples arose respecting my intentions of 
relinquishing this part of my duty; but at length worldly interests 
prevailed so far as to induce me to excuse the attendance of my ap- 
prentices, and not long after it was deemed advisable, for the more 
eager prosecution of business, to make the prayer with my wife, 
when we rose in the morning, suffice for the day. 

11 Notwithstanding the repeated checks of conscience that fol- 
lowed this base omission, the calls of a flourishing concern and the 
prospect of an increasing family appeared so imperious and com- 
manding that I found an easy excuse for my fatal evil, especially 
as I did not omit prayer altogether. My conscience was now al- 
most seared as with a hot iron, when it pleased the Lord to 
awaken me by a singular providence. 

" One day I received a letter from a young man who had form- 
erly been my apprentice, previous to my omitting family prayer. 
Not doubting but I continued domestic worship his letter was 
chiefly on this subject ; it was couched in the most affectionate and 
respectful terms ; but judge of my surprise and confusion when I 
read these words : 'O, my dear master, never, never shall I be able 
sufficiently to thank you for the precious privilege with which you 
indulged me in your family devotions. O, sir, eternity will be too 
short to praise my God for what I learned there. It was there I 
first beheld my lost and wretched state as a sinner ; it was there 
that I first knew the way of salvation, and there that I first ex- 
perienced the preciousness of Christ in me, the hope of glory. O, 
sir, permit me to say, never, never neglect those precious engage- 
ments ; you have yet a family and more apprentices ; may your 
house be the birthplace of their souls!' I could read no further; 
every line flashed condemnation in my face. I trembled, I shud- 
dered, I was alarmed lest the blood of my children and apprentices 
should be demanded at my soul-murdering hands. 

" Filled with confusion, and bathed in tears, I fled for refuge in 
secret. I spread the letter before God. I agonized, and — but you 
can better conceive than I can describe my feelings ; suffice it to 
say that light broke in upon my disconsolate soul and a sense of 
blood-bought pardon was obtained. I immediately flew to my 
family, presented them before the Lord, and from that day to the 



60 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

present I have been faithful, and am determined, through grace, 
that whenever my business becomes so large as to interrupt my 
family prayer I will give up the superfluous part of my business 
and retain my devotion ; better to lose a few shillings than to be- 
come the deliberate murderer of my family and the instrument of 
ruin to my own soul." 

4. Supposing this regular assembling of ourselves to be a daily 
observance in our houses, we may proceed to remark upon the 
three several parts of social worship : reading the Scriptures, sing- 
ing, and prayer. 

(1.) Our children and servants will learn more of the Scripture at 
our family-altar than anywhere else. The word of God should be 
read to them not as a dull formality, but as containing the most im- 
portant instructions for time and for eternity. The head of the 
family himself should endeavor to gather a lesson from its pages 
every time he reads. To slur it over, to read it as a form, to enun- 
ciate its truths w r ith carelessness, is to treat God's word with irrev- 
erence. Very much of the profit of Scripture-reading is lost when 
the head of the family opens anywhere and reads the first passage 
which comes to his eye. " The whole counsel of God " thus fails 
to be brought before the family, the same passages are frequently 
repeated, and thus the interest of variety is lost. Some, in whose 
judgment we have great confidence, insist upon the propriety of 
reading the whole Bible through consecutively. From this opinion 
we dissent with becoming diffidence. That every one should read 
the entire volume in private, " genealogical tables and all," is un- 
questionably a duty, and must be profitable. The head of every 
family should teach those committed to his charge to search the 
Scriptures in this way. We confess, however, that we cannot see 
the propriety of persevering through such passages as occur, for in- 
stance, in the fifteenth and nineteenth chapters of Joshua, and many 
similar places in the Old Testament. It is all edifying. The dis- 
position of the land of Canaan to the tribes of Israel by lot showed 
the fulfillment'of a wonderful prophecy, and on a genealogical table 
may hang a series of important arguments ; and so, in our private 
reading, the whole Bible must be read and studied devoutly ; but 
we cannot see that it is most profitable to read the whole to a 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 6 1 

family." At the same time we must be allowed to say that we have 
a high respect for the pious feelings of those whose reverence for the 
Bible will not allow them to omit a single verse, although we differ 
from them in opinion. Such portions as are most appropriate to 
family reading might be read in the order in which they occur in the 
Bible, a chapter from the Old Testament in the morning, and one 
from the New Testament at night. It has been suggested that a 
course of subjects might be selected. " For instance, you might 
read the parables as one series, and the miracles of Christ as an- 
other. You might select the biographical portions and read the 
lives of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Peter, Paul," etc. The reader will 
choose for himself; only let as much as possible of God's word be 
heard by your family, and strive to interest them in the narrative, 
the precept, or the promise, by occasional simple, illustrative re- 
marks, or short appropriate anecdotes. Frequently ask some mem- 
ber of the family, "Who said this? " " What does that mean?'* 
and similar questions, easily answered and calculated to keep the 
attention fixed upon what is read. Above all, endeavor to prac- 
tice as you read, and let all about you learn from your whole man- 
ner while reading, and from your conduct subsequently, that yours 
is a practical faith in the divine origin of the Bible. 

(2.) The service at our family altar will be enlivened and improved 
if singing be made one of its parts. Music is a blessing from God. 
The family where there is no song is a family indeed unblest. Where 
there is little musical talent, even that little should be given to the 
Lord. Where there are children they soon learn to take delight in 
singing, and the servants ought to be exhorted to join in this part 
of the worship. It will redeem the service from dullness. We have 
already alluded to the family devotion conducted by our Saviour with 
his disciples. The example of our Lord in any particular should not be 
lost upon us. He sang and prayed. Compare Matt, xxvi, 30, with 
John xvii. Our hymns are often full of petitions, and the music 
quickens our faculties. " Whoso offereth praise glorifieth Me." 
Then " let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord." Much 
of heaven is praise. They sing and shout at the throne. The song 

* The other side of the question is forcibly stated by Dr. Alexander, in his Thoughts on Family 

Worship, pp, 206, 207. 



62 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

is the same — " the song of Moses and the Lamb." On earth our 
hearts should be tuned, and then, when called to the choirs above, 
we shall not be altogether ignorant of the theme or of the music. 

In this service, also, an occasional question or remark, just before 
or just after singing a stanza, would tend to call attention to senti- 
ments which otherwise might be passed over with negligence from 
frequent repetition. " Do we feel this gratitude which we are about 
to express to God for having kept us during the night ?" Or, "Are 
we sincere in this confession of sin which we have made, or are about 
to make? " Or, " Do we intend to pay unto the Lord, the vow which 
we have just uttered ? " Such questions would make those to 
whom they were addressed feel that they must not come before 
God in a careless manner. They would be led to remember that 
what they say on earth is heard and remembered in heaven. 
Thus would that part of the service which is so cheering be made 
solemn, and our " holy mirth " would go up to the Lord as a sweet- 
smelling savor. 

(3.) Prayer — united prayer — is a necessary part of family wor- 
ship. This portion of duty should not be performed carelessly. 
We would premeditate before speaking to an earthly king : — the 
King of heaven must be addressed with awe. If there be any 
thing in our method of conducting this part of worship which is 
calculated to make it dull to our servants and our children we are 
bound to correct it, so that God's service may not be injured by our 
improprieties. It may be too long, and we have observed that as a 
general thing the devotion appeared to be inversely as the length 
of a prayer ; that where men had nothing that lay like a load upon 
their hearts, and which they felt compelled to throw down before 
the Lord, they have felt at leisure to go coldly over many subjects, 
until the whole family has become wearied and finally disgusted 
w 7 ith the service. Where a man prays for every thing to-day his 
prayer to-morrow must be a repetition of all or a part of the same. 
A few topics should be chosen and urged at the mercy-seat. The 
prayer may be too short. We may satisfy conscience by falling 
upon our knees, racing through a brief form, springing up, and run- 
ning about our secular business ; but this is not prayer, whatever 
else it may be. There is no devotion there, and our families soon 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



63 



perceive it. Sometimes the prayer is delivered in a whine or tone 
which gives it a sanctimonious, pretentious air, and destroys the 
feeling of devotion in those who hear. With awe, humility, sim- 
plicity, and love should we come into the presence of the Highest ; 
and, thus coming, we shall speak with dignity, without affectation, 
with a subdued and humble, but not cringing spirit, as friend to 
friend, as an inferior to a superior who is great and good and wise 
and condescending. 

The lesson which is read from the Bible ought to have effect upon 
the prayer which follows. We should attempt to catch the spirit of 
the passage we have read. Its doctrines and precepts, its lessons 
and promises, should be made the basis of our thanksgiving, suppli- 
cation, and confession. Two things are gained by this : first, the 
truths of the Scripture are impressed upon us ; second, a scriptural 
variety is imparted to our prayers. The circumstances by which we 
are surrounded should be made matter of prayer. Sickness and 
health, prosperity and adversity, arrivals and departures, late news 
from distant friends, the conversation of the day, or of a short period 
just before prayers, the sermon lately heard, dispensations of God's 
providence to our neighbors, the events in the town, the general 
state of the Church or of the nation, the striking ecclesiastical and 
national events which are occurring from time to time, the seasons, 
our plans and pursuits — these, and a hundred other things, may be 
in turn made the subject of our prayers to our heavenly Father, who 
regards even the minutest matter which concerns us. Let us not 
forget to pray for any friend who is visiting our house and kneeling 
with us, nor the pastor of the particular church to which we belong, 
nor the Sunday-school teacher and the other instructors of our chil- 
dren, nor our aged own parents, if they are living, nor the editor of the 
religious paper which is taken in our family, nor the sick whom we 
have visited during the day, nor the society, missionary station, or re- 
ligious or benevolent enterprise in which any of our children are in- 
terested, or concerning which they may have been making inquiries ; 
let every thing that reaches our circle be sanctified by our domestic 
piety. If our Christian charities and sympathies run out as they should 
we shall never be at a loss for subjects. And family prayer should 
be made thus comprehensive. While, first of all, our own spiritual 



64 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

wants are told to our Father, and we pray earnestly for such things 
as we need, we must be careful not to narrow our hearts to the little 
group of which we form a portion. The whole family must be an- 
imated with the fine, flowing, expansive spirit of our holy faith. 

In our prayers, that they may produce the desired moral effect, 
we must appear to expect that God will hear us and answer us. 
Shall we assume this appearance ? God forbid ! Can we do it ? 
No ! Children detect such hypocrisy with remarkable quickness. 
How, then, shall it be accomplished ? To seem good, be good ; to 
seem to have faith, have faith. The character of the piety of the 
head of the family is to affect all the worship. If we realize God's 
presence, if we are in earnest in our desires, we will press our suit ; 
the solicitude of our souls will come out in our tones and laneuaee 
and general manner, and the whole family will be brought into 
sympathy with us, and will learn to call upon God as one who is not 
very far off. This we must do, whether we use forms previously 
prepared or speak in extemporaneous petitions. A scriptural form 
of prayer may be set on fire by the holy ardor of our souls and be 
a burnt-offering pleasing to God, or we be stupid in using language 
of our own, our hearts unengaged, and our worship a mockery. Let 
him who leads the devotion select his method for the particular oc- 
casion ; but, whatever that be, let him be sure that he means what 
he says, lest he present that abominable thing to God which the 
heart of the Lord loathes — an unmeant prayer. 

Let the head of the family study the devotional parts of the Bible, 
especially the book of the Psalms, and enrich his mind with petitions 
which the Holy Ghost has inspired. Let him have in his closet- 
library a few books of prayers, such as Jenks's, and Jay's, and 
Thornton's, and Berrian's. They are all easily procured. In his re- 
tirement let him peruse these and the kindred books of private de- 
votion, and then when he comes as the minister, and in some sort 
priest of his family, to lead them to God in prayer, he will have his 
mouth filled with arguments, and the Spirit itself will help his infirm- 
ities, and the Lord in the heavens will hear, and the windows of 
heaven will be opened, and grace and mercy and peace from God 
our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ will rest upon his house- 
hold, and his children will rise up and call him blessed ; and when 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 65 

he has gone to worship in the upper sanctuary some one who has 
been instructed by his ministrations and incited by his example 
shall be raised to take his place, and thus shall his descendants be a 
seed to serve God down to the last generation. 



PARTING WORDS. 

It may be that some one not a professor of the religion of our 
Lord Jesus Christ has read these few pages to see what might be 
said upon this subject. Supposing such a one to be the reader now 
it is natural to imagine him asking the question, Shall / institute 
family worship in my house? Friend, why not? You need God's 
blessing; so do your children. Why not? Who shall hinder you? 
Perhaps your wife or some other member of your family is pious. 
You owe it to such a one to give her or him all aid in struggling 
against the tide of sin. But you say that you yourself are a sinner ; 
then you need God's grace. Commence this work, and you may be 
converted in the very act of setting up the altar. But think a mo- 
ment ! If you are a sinner you are on the road to ruin; will you 
draw your wife, your children, your servants with you down to the 
sides of the pit ? Of course you have no heart for this work, and we 
have spoken to you in this matter to show you from another point 
the destructive character of your course of life. How vastly wrong 
that life must be if it is so far removed from all that is good that 
you cannot for a moment entertain the idea of doing that which,. 
because it is so right, is so inconsistent with all the tenor of your 
practices ! Cease to do evil. Seek the salvation of your own soul, 
and then you will be prepared to discharge the duties devolving 
upon you as a husband, a father, and a master. 

But there are Christians to whom we must speak a few parting 
words. Perhaps, reader, you afe in a family where there is no do- 
mestic worship, and have been excusing yourself from this duty be- 
cause you are not the head. Is the head a member of the Church ? 
If so, then you have grounds upon which you may safely address 
him upon this subject. Have you ever requested him to bring this 
blessing to the hearth-stone where you have enjoyed so many happy 

hours? If not, are you guiltless? Can you conceive no plan by 
.5 



66 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

which you might so bring it about that domestic worship may be 
established under the roof that shelters you? If you can, and do 
not, are you guiltless? Perhaps the head is irreligious, and you are 
one of the younger members. It is not altogether a natural state of 
things that you should be the leader in any domestic arrangement ; 
but should not the dreadful condition in which the family now is, 
without God's favor, under God's wrath, embolden and strengthen 
you to make the effort, to secure permission to conduct the service, 
and to discharge it faithfully before God ? Remember, " to him 
who knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, it is sin." You may 
expect his blessing if you try. As your day so shall your strength 
be. Your own Christian character will be strengthened ; you will 
be fitted by this effort to enter upon large fields of usefulness. " Go 
forward," is Israel's watchword. Try it — humbly, in God's name, 
try it ! You cannot tell the result ; but you know it is right, it is 
your duty, to strive to effect this great object. If you succeed you 
will be withdrawing another family from the number of the heathen 
and adding it to the number of the worshipers. You will have 
opened a fountain whose increasing stream may sweep in a wide and 
fertilizing circle through the Church, and descend, with its purifying 
influence, to ages far down in this world's history. 

In the following examples, selected from Arvine's Cyclopedia of 
Religious Anecdotes, you may find an incitement to make an effort 
in behalf of those you love. 

The Son s Admonition. — My father, says Professor B., was one of 
those still men who, much as he thought of company, carried on 
his part of conversation in brief questions and monosyllabic answers. 
He had deceived himself into the belief that his talents were not 
such as to make it his duty to conduct family worship. With this 
view he had lived for more than forty years in every other respect 
a consistent Christian. A son who, at the time referred to, was pre- 
paring for the ministry, and already licensed to preach, was spend- 
ing a vacation at home ; the last evening of his stay had arrived ; 
the family Bible, as usual, is placed before him on the stand, with a 
request to lead in prayer. The thought occurred that now, for a 
year or more, whatever devotion might be felt, no voice .of prayer 
could be heard in the family except from the lips of strangers who 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 6? 

should turn in for the night. The thought affected him, and, en- 
deavoring to use such a manner as would become him in addressing 
a father almost threescore years and ten, he said, " Father, I delight 
to lead in this exercise when at home, but I am affected with the 
thought that there is to be no more prayer here until I shall return. 
How is it that you have never established family prayer ? I know the 
diffidence of your nature ; I know it would be hard to overcome it ; 
but would it not have been attended with satisfaction to yourself and 
a blessing to your family worth a far greater sacrifice ? You can ask 
a favor of a neighbor ; to do the same thing with God is prayer ; and 
he greatly mistakes who thinks that the best prayer is that clothed 
in the most fluent language." The old man was affected, said he 
knew that it was so, and then gave an account of his feelings and 
practice in this respect since the commencement of his Christian 
course. Tears glistened in the eyes of some unaccustomed to weep 
for sin, and the father's expression gave encouragement to hope that 
the suggestion would not be in vain, and that an altar would still 
be erected whence incense and a daily offering should daily rise to 
heaven. On the following day, before leaving, the son mentioned 
the scene of the previous evening to the minister of the place, who 
took an opportunity to add his influence to w r hat had been said, 
and it proved effectual. The man whose voice, though for forty 
years a professed Christian and a father, had never been heard in 
prayer by his children, at the age of threescore years and ten com- 
menced the discharge of that duty in his family and, so far as I know, 
never ceased until the infirmities of age rendered it impossible. His 
children, ten in number, who had not before, have since professed 
the religion of Christ ; though I cannot say how much the father's 
prayers had to do w r i.th this result. 

Family Prayer by two Daughters. — A gentleman, residing in the 
western part of the State of New York, had sent two of his 
daughters to Litchfield to be educated. While they were there 
God was pleased to bless the place with a revival of religion. The 
news of it reached the ears of their father. He was much troubled 
for his daughters, " apprehensive," to use his own words, " lest their 
minds should be affected and they be frightened into religion." 

Alive, as he thought, to their happiness, and determined to allay 



68 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

their fears and quiet their distresses, he sent a friend to Litchfield 
with positive orders to bring them immediately home, that they 
might not be lost to all happiness and hope and consigned to gloom 
and despondency. The messenger departed on his errand. But 
they had already chosen Christ for their portion, and had resolved 
that, whatever others might do, they would serve the Lord. 

They returned to their father's not overwhelmed, as he expected, 
with gloom and despondency, but with hearts glowing with grat- 
itude to God and countenances beaming with serenity and hope. 
Indeed, they rejoiced in the Saviour. Soon after their return they 
were anxious to establish family worship. They affectionately re- 
quested their father to commence that duty. He replied that he 
saw no use in it. He had lived very well more than fifty years with- 
out prayer, and he could not be burdened with it now. They then 
asked permission to pray with the family themselves. Not thinking 
they would have confidence to do it he assented to the proposition. 

The duties of the day being ended and the hour for retiring to rest 
having arrived, the sisters drew forward the stand and placed on it 
the Bible ; one read a chapter, they both kneeled, the other engaged 
in prayer. The father stood, and while the humble, fervent prayer 
of his daughter was ascending to heaven his knees began to tremble ; 
he also kneeled, and then became prostrate on the floor. God heard 
their prayer, and directed their father's weeping eyes, which had 
never shed tears of penitence before, to the Lamb of God who 
taketh away the sin of the world. 

Happy family! a believing father and believing children, whose 
God is the Lord. 

Family Worship Established by a Child. — A boy, about fourteen 
years of age, who had learned at one of the schools belonging to the 
Gaelic Society the value of his own soul, was deeply impressed with 
the importance of family religion. As none of the family could read 
but himself he intimated his intention of establishing family worship. 
No answer w T as made, no opposition started, and as little encourage- 
ment given. Still, he made the attempt. He read the Scriptures 
and prayed for himself and all present. The rest of the family 
looked on. Alone he continued to worship God in this manner for 
some time, the others being merely spectators ; but at length one 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 6 9 

after another sank down on their knees beside him, until the whole 
domestic circle united in the hallowed exercise, the gray-headed 
father kneeling down beside his child and joining in his artless as- 
pirations to God the Father of all. 

" Sir, who have you been talking with ? " — There lived in a town 
in Vermont a man who had a large family of children. He was poor 
and unable to keep them at home ; he put some of them away from 
him to live. It was the favored lot of a little girl, I think about 
eight years of age, to fall into a family where daily prayers were 
offered up to Almighty God. Prayer she was unacquainted with. 
The subject was new to her. At home she never heard a prayer. 
An astonishment seized her when she saw her master, night and 
morning, standing in one corner of the room talking, as she termed 
it, with something that she could not see. An anxiety swelled in 
her little bosom to know who it could be. Unwilling to ask one of 
the family with whom she lived, yet solicitous to know, she obtained 
leave to go home. She had hardly reached the lonely cottage be- 
fore she asked her mother who it was that her master talked with 
when standing in the corner of the room night and morning. She 
told her that she did not know — being herself a heathen, though in 
a Christian land. Not satisfied, she asked her father, who answered, 
in a thoughtless and inhuman manner, " The devil, I suppose." The 
little inquisitive child returned uninformed to her master, where she 
witnessed the same promptitude and holy ardor as before. Not 
many days had elapsed before she summoned fortitude enough to 
put the question. 

One morning, after her master had been talking with the unknown 
being, she stepped up before him and said, " Sir, who have you been 
talking with this morning? " The question was so unexpected, and 
from such a source, that at first he felt unable to answer her, and 
was unusually impressed with the importance of the duty of prayer 
and the weight of obligation resting upon him to approach God 
aright. But after recollecting himself a little he said, and that with 
reverence, " I have been trying to talk with God." " God ! " said 
she, with astonishment. ''Where is he? where does he live?" 
Many questions of a similar nature she put with much interest and 
feeling, to which her master gave her such answers as were calculated 



70 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

to awaken the liveliest feelings of her mind in regard to Jehovah. 
After she had learned all her little mind could retain of divine things 
she desired, with an earnestness that could not be resisted, to go home 
and see her parents. Go she must. Leave was granted ; she went 
home to her father's cottage, a place where prayer was not wont to 
be made, with her little bosom beating with a high tone of pious 
feeling in view of the importance of prayer. She went to her father 
and said, "Father, pray." She urged with warmth a compliance; 
but he utterly refused. She then went to her mother and asked her 
to pray ; but with no better success. She could not endure it any 
longer; her feelings must vent themselves in words. She said, 
" Let us pray." She knelt down and prayed, and it appears to me 
that Scripture was fulfilled, " The effectual, fervent prayer of the 
righteous availeth much." In answer to her prayer both of her 
parents were brought under conviction, which terminated in hope- 
ful conversion to God. And this was the beginning of an extensive 
revival of religion. 

"The republic is at the firesides," said the Roman orator; the 
Church is there, too. How greatly shall we be rewarded if we have 
strengthened the purposes or assisted the methods of any man who 
already has his family trained to habits of domestic piety ! It is a 
small field, but it is the nursery of the Church. Persevere, brother 
worshiper ! The little ones at your side are growing for the pulpit, 
for the religious press, for the place of social prayer, for the commit- 
tee of Christian enterprise. Fill them with the truth, breathe over 
their widening path the breath of a father's prayer, and expect, as 
you may expect, the blessing of the Highest on their souls. Family 
prayer will not save our children. We all know this. But we know, 
also, that it will place them under the most favorable circumstances. 
Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. It is 
fanaticism to expect the blessing of the Lord without using the 
means which he has appointed. And these means should be used 
with faith. The promise is to us and to our children. We may ex- 
pect his blessing who "keepeth mercy for thousands (of generations) 
of those that love him " if our children are taught from their infancy 
to love him and to walk in his ways. 

And here it may be well for those of us who are attempting to 



FOR E VER Y FIRESIDE. y I 

discharge this duty to remember that it is necessary, for the full ef- 
fect of this labor, that our lives be consistent therewith. We shall 
harden the hearts and strengthen the skepticism of our families if 
we pray for the coming of Christ's kingdom and act so as to prevent 
its establishment ; if we pray for blessings and show by our lives 
that we do not desire them ; if we profess upon our knees to believe 
that the eye of the Lord is upon us and then indulge those tempers 
and speak those words which show that we have not the Lord in 
our thoughts all the day long; if we treat God's providence and the 
plan of human redemption and eternity, with its holy heaven and 
its horrible hell, as solemn verities in the .prayers which we offer, 
and yet so shape our paths, our business, and our pleasures as if 
those things were only parts of a cunningly-devised fable, so cun- 
ningly devised that we must express our belief in them, yet so cer- 
tainly fables that they are not to stand in the way of our gain or our 
enjoyment. Let us so live that family prayer may manifestly be 
only one of the developments of that love for Jesus which should 
rule our hearts more than any passion. 

A last word to the householder who has never yet led his family 
to the Lord for his blessing : You profess to believe in the revela- 
tions of the Bible — that there is a judgment, and a world of woe, and 
a glorious heaven. You have clothed, fed, educated your children. 
You have given them comforts. Perhaps you are rich and have 
given them luxuries. You have endeavored to introduce them to 
the best society. But you have never assembled them for worship. 
The appeal is made to the heart of a parent. Your child must die. 
You can scarcely believe it, but you know it must be so. In that 
dread hour when you see a thousand precious, clustering hopes go- 
ing down into the grave, when you can scarcely bear the blow, 
when you would give all you have ever inherited or earned to bribe 
inexorable death and hold your child to your embraces still, while 
standing breathless in that curtained room in which you have so 
long watched the work of ruin as it has gone noiselessly on, that child 
may call you to him and say— O, could you bear it? — " Father, you 
have been kind to me, you have done much forme, but I must leave 
you now. Father, I am not ready to die. I am a sinner. Father, 
I have never heard you pray. O, if you had only prayed with us all 



72 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

I might have been arrested and saved. Farewell, father ; I forgive 
you, may God also forgive you ! " Could you bear that? It may 
be in reserve for you. Avert it while you may. 

You may die before your children. If you do you will not leave 
behind an indubitable testimony for Jesus. Your pastor arid your 
family will reflect with pain upon your unfaithfulness in this partic- 
ular. If you have had no family altar your children have lacked a 
Christian education, and in leaving them it must be with the dis- 
tressing thought that you have been faithless to your dearest. And 
there is the bar of God, the judgment-seat of Christ. Pastor and 
wife and children and servants will meet you there ; to none of these 
have you been faithful. The Church, so injured by your example, 
lacking so many blessings, because you had no altar at your home, 
will rise up against you. And the privileges and mercies you have 
enjoyed, but have not improved, will speak against you. How can 
you answer for these ? Be wise ; commence now. Say to your fam- 
ily, " O come, let us sing unto the Lord ; let us make a joyful noise 
to the Rock of our salvation. Let us come before his presence with 
thanksgiving, and make a joyful noise unto him with psalms. For 
the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods. O come, 
let us worship and bow down ; let us kneel before the Lord our 
Maker. For he is our God ; and we are the people of his pasture, 
and the sheep of his hands." Do this, and when your heart and 
your flesh fail there will be those whom you have trained to pray 
filling your chamber with the breath of devotion, circling your bed 
with the power of faith, and commending your departing spirit to 
your God and their God, to your Father and their Father. 




THE LIBRARY 



f<£) II. <§) 




. FOR THE LIBRARY . 




A SCOTCH VERDICT. 

[In the examination of the hypothesis of evolution the author has endeavored to 
avoid all dogmatism and all special pleading. His aim has been to ascertain for 
himself Just what is the posture of the hypothesis at this time, without much re- 
gard to how it stood in the past, or any regard to its possible future, or any care 
for the effect which the result of his honest study might have on any scientific, 
philosophical, or theological opinion previously held by him. 

In that spirit it is given to the reader, with the simple reminder that it was not 
written for scholars, but for the people who have no time for scientific and philo- 
sophical studies. The feeling that he was writing ad populum has made him 
more scrupulously careful in his employment of expressions and use of statements 
in which, if errors occur, scholars can more readily supply the correction than can 
those readers who must take on authority what they know in these departments. 

This treatise was published in 1885 in book-form as one of the series of the 
Lovell Library. \ 

PART I. 

I.— THE CASE STATED. 

In each case which involves a felony American juries render a 
verdict of Guilty or Not Guilty. There must be many cases sub- 
mitted to juries in which they cannot decide that the accused is 
" Guilty," and yet his innocence has not been so established as that 
they can pronounce him " Not Guilty." Scotch juries, in such a 
case, save the accused, while they avoid indorsing his character, by 
bringing in a verdict which is a judgment made, not upon the 
accused, but upon the allegations contained in the indictment, and 
that verdict is " Not Proven." 



;6 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

Outside the court-house there must come for judgment before 
every thoughtful mind propositions, hypotheses, theories, which 
have some show of evidence, which can produce something to raise 
a suspicion, or even create a possibility, and perhaps some prob- 
ability, of their truth, while so much known truth lies against one's 
accepting them that the only rational verdict that can be rendered 
is the Scotch verdict, " Not Proven." 

It seems that that is the status of the hypothesis of evolution. In 
many journals, in many lectures, in many conversations we find it 
taken as a closed case which had gained a favorable verdict. Even 
sometimes we find this groundless assumption in our school-books. 
Moreover, books are written and lectures delivered, and (save the 
mark !) sermons are delivered, which could have no coherency with- 
out the cool assumption that evolution is as settled a scientific doc- 
trine as the doctrine of gravitation. 

One writer, Mr. John Fiske {Destiny of Man, p. 20), tells us that 
man descended from a stock of primates back to which we may 
also trace the converging pedigrees of monkeys and lemurs, until 
their ancestry becomes indistinguishable from that of rabbits and 
squirrels. And then, apparently upon the supposition that he 
would not have a single well-informed reader, he ventures to tell us 
that 

there is no more reason for supposing that this conclusion will ever be gainsaid than 
for supposing that the Copernican astronomy will some time be overthrown and 
the concentric spheres of Dante's heaven reinstated in the minds of men. 

And this in face of the fact that the statement is rejected by a ma- 
jority of the leading scientific men of this day, such men as Von 
Baer, Virchow, Barrande, Alfred Russel Wallace, Mivart, De Qua- 
trefages, Dana, Dawson, Sir William Thomson, Carruthers, Clerk 
Maxwell, and others. 

Nothing could be further from the fact than the statement that 
the doctrine of evolution is a settled scientific doctrine. Guyot says 
{Creation, p. 128) that 

the question of evolution within each of these great systems — of matter into various 
forms of matter, of life into various forms of life, and of mankind into all its vari- 
eties — is still open. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



77 



In this treatise, from a mass of matter a few facts are selected, 
from the fair consideration of which it is believed that, in this case, 
the candid reader will conclude that the only verdict which can be 
rendered is the Scotch verdict, " Not Proven." 

Let us bear in mind that it is not undertaken to show that the 
evolution hypothesis is false, but simply to show that its advocates 
have not established its truth up to Christmas, A. D. 1885. 

II.— DEFINITIONS. 

Evolution is a word used to designate a certain theory of the 
universe. It may be represented as the doctrine which sets forth the 
production of all things from a primordial germ, by a process which has 
been described as a change from that which is homogeneous to that 
which is heterogeneous ; from the indefinite and undetermined to that 
which is definite and determined; from the incoherent to the coherent; 
from the simple to the complex. The cause of this change is supposed 
to be in the ultimate laws of matter, force, and motion. ■ Mr. Spencer, 
who, more than any other man, has endeavored to " elaborate a con- 
sistent philosophy of evolution on a scientific basis," sets out with 
" the assumption of a limited mass of homogeneous matter, acted 
upon by incident forces." Professor Huxley {Critiques and Ad- 
dresses) says that the fundamental proposition of evolution is 

that the whole world, living' and not living, is the result of the mutual interaction, 
according to definite laws, of the forces possessed by the molecules of which the 
primitive nebulosity of the universe was composed. 

In the words of Principal Dawson it is a hypothesis 

which solves the question of human origin by assuming that human nature exists 
potentially in mere inorganic matter, and that a chain of spontaneous derivation 
connects incandescent molecules or star-dust with the world and with man himself 
{The Earth and Man, pp. 316-317). 

There are very many difficulties in this theory. These, however, 
do not prove it false. They simply postpone its acceptance. One 
serious difficulty lies in the very fact of this postponement. When 
a question has been fairly before the world for hundreds of years, 
and when the ablest minds in three most recent generations of squ 
entific men have been devoted to its investigation, and yet so little 
approach is made to unanimity, men practically say that there must 



yS CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

be some latent but powerful vice in the reasoning by which it is 
upheld. 

III.— NEITHER A RELIGIOUS NOR A SENTIMENTAL QUESTION. 

It is to be observed that all the difficulties of evolution have a 
scientific basis. There is no religious reason for its acceptance or 
rejection. 

Professor Francis L. Patton ( Presbyterian Review, January, 1885) 
has shown that it is not evolution in its scientific aspect so much, 
but rather the metaphysical supplement of evolution, that is specially 
hostile to the Gospel. 

Sir William Thomson, the eminent English scientist, refuses to 
accept the doctrine of evolution, not because it would interfere with 
his religious belief, but simply because it is wholly unproved. Dr. 
Field, of the Evangelist, reports him as saying : 

That man could be evolved out of inferior animals is the wildest dream of ma- 
terialism, a pure assumption, which offended him alike by its folly and its arro- 
gance. 

One theory of evolution does not touch the question of origin. It 
simply describes a process of development. It is easy to conceive 
a man believing in God the Father Almighty while holding that 
that God originally created a single cell, or monad, or molecule, and 
endowed it with all potencies, so that it might grow into all there 
now is in the universe. At a meeting in Boston, Sept. II, 1882, 
Professor Gray, who is known as a follower of Darwin, is reported 
to have presented the following views : 

Nature is either the outcome of mind or mind is the outcome of nature. These 
are the only alternatives. The former has been more commonly held, at least till 
the beginning of the present generation. The question is, Has modern science 
proved the contrary? No. In response to the question, however, the naturalists 
have said not a little. They have presented many facts which help to make an 
answer. But the present demand is for the theologians to tell us what they think. 
I, for one, do not believe that, after the matter has been thoroughly sifted, the 
grounds of our faith in Jesus Christ are to be materially affected. The cause of 
Christianity will not suffer at the hands of physical science. We may be obliged to 
recast certain beliefs, but we may still be good Christians, and accept the religion 
of Christ as contained in the four gospels. 

He has since published his views in two lectures delivered to the 
Theological School of Yale College. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. jg 

Professor Winchell is an able evolutionist of a certain school, and 
yet in the Homiletic Review, August, 1885, says: " What are nat- 
ural things? Existences which have been brought into being by 
some superhuman power." All through his able writings Professor 
Winchell manifests his intelligent Christianity ; but he is an evolu- 
tionist. 

It may be added that Mivart, the celebrated English scientist, an 
earnest Roman Catholic, is a theistic evolutionist. 

Even Professor Huxley {Critiques and Addresses, p. 274) says: 

The teleological and the mechanical views of nature are not, necessarily, mutu- 
ally exclusive. On the contrary, the more purely a mechanist the speculator is 
the more firmly does he assume a primordial molecular arrangement, of which all 
the phenomena of the universe are the consequences ; and the more completely is 
he thereby at the mercy of the teleologists, who can always defy him to disprove 
that this primordial molecular arrangement was not intended to evolve the phe- 
nomena of the universe. 

Dr. McCosh, the President of Princeton College, made the follow- 
ing assertions in an address before the General Conference of the 
Evangelical Alliance : 

It is useless to tell the younger naturalists that there is no truth in the doctrine 
of development, for they know that there is truth which is not to be set aside by 
denunciation. Religious philosophers might be more profitably employed in show- 
ing them the religious aspects of the doctrine of development; and some would be 
grateful to any who would help them to keep their old faith in God and the Bible 
with their new faith in science. 

Again, in his book on Development, Dr. McCosh says : 

It is no use denying in our day the doctrine of evolution, in the name of religion 
or any good cause. It can now be shown that it rather favors religions by its 
furnishing proofs of design, and by the wonderful parallelism between Genesis and 
geology. 

The following are the words of Professor George I. Chase, LL.D., 
an eminent Christian scientist, and for forty-three years a distin- 
guished member of the faculty of the oldest Baptist university in 
America : 

Are not the energies revealed in matter sufficiently enduring and sufficiently 
obedient to law ? Waiving for the present the great difficulties attending the de- 
velopment hypothesis, and passing over the very slender foundation upon which it 
rests, let us entertain it for a moment, and see what bearing it has upon our argu- 
ment. Does it enable us to dispense with intelligence ? Does it do anything more 



So CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

than carry to a point farther back the directive power of mind ? Would the proper 
adjustment of the primordial atoms require no thought? The placing of them in 
relations to one another such that, by their definitely regulated interaction, con- 
tinued through the cosmic ages, they should in the end of time achieve the mar- 
vels of life and intelligence which we behold- around us ? To start movements in 
the nebulous matter which should travel down the aeons of eternity, until at length, 
suns and systems completed, they should appear on the earth in the production of 
eyes and ears and hearts and hands and brains, with all their wonderful endow- 
ments — would this demand no effort of mind ? On the contrary, would it not 
suppose an intelligence which, flashing along the line of antecedent and conse- 
quent, should take in at a single glance all the possibilities offered by the original 
chaos of atoms ? Should the so-called development hypothesis ever be established 
on the firm basis of observation and induction, which I deem highly improbable, it 
could lead us legitimately only to sublimer conceptions of the attributes of Deity. 
Instead of embarrassing theism it would assist in removing difficulties attending 
it. It would explain, for instance, in a satisfactory manner, the origin of certain exist- 
ing forms of life, which it is not easy to imagine God could take pleasure in directly 
creating. If the argument for the divine existence derived from this wider and 
more profound view of nature be less convincing than the argument from special 
structures, it is because the mind, overwhelmed and paralyzed by the vastness of 
the premises, moves with enfeebled energy to the conclusion. A larger and 
stronger intelligence would arrive at the truth with as much certainty, and hold it 
with as firm a grasp. In the embryology of the universe, as in the embryology of 
every living inhabitant of our planet, God walks in ways which we do not under- 
stand, because in the one case we have not faculties large enough, and in the other 
minute enough, to trace his footsteps. 

The late Robert Patterson {Errors of Evolution, pp. 206-207) calls 
attention to the fact that 

Mr. Spencer argues that there is a greater display of wisdom in evolution than in 
creation. At any rate evolution can never establish atheism. 

Creation by law is as divine as creation by command. Mr. Spencer is not the 
only one nor the first to assert this doctrine. The theological view of evolution 
has been maintained in past ages by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. St. 
Basil speaks of the continued operation of natural laws in the production of all 
organisms. St. Thomas says : " In the institution of nature we do not look for 
miracles, but what belongs to the nature of things, as St. Augustine says " (Sum. 
i.-lxvii, 4 and 3). And in a similar strain we find modern divines asserting that 
the proofs of the existence of the Supreme Intelligence, would not be destroyed 
were evolution established as a fact. Dr. McCosh devotes the first chapter of his 
work, Christianity and Positivism, to the illustration of the evidences of design 
given by the supposed evolution from primeval fire-mist; and engages, if the 
theory of evolution and spontaneous generation should be established while he is 
alive, to demonstrate that it necessitates God to originate and operate it. The Duke 
of Argyle sees nothing atheistic in creation by law. And leading evolutionists 
like Mr. Huxley affirm {Critiques and Addresses, p. 272) that " Darwinism does 
not affect the doctrine of final causes." Mr. Wallace, one of the originators of 
Darwin's theory, says {Natural Selection, p. 368), after showing that we have no 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 8 1 

direct knowledge of any force in the universe but our own will-power : " If, there- 
tore, we have traced one force, however minute, to the origin in our own will, while 
we have no knowledge of any other primary cause of force, it does not seem an 
improbable conclusion that all force maybe will-FORCE ; and thus that the whole 
universe is not merely dependent on, but actually is the will of higher intelligences, 
or of one supreme intelligence." And Professor Owen {Anatomy of Vertebrates, 
Chapter XL.) sums up the argument for design in a sentence which defies refuta- 
tion : " A purposive route of development and change, of correlation and interde- 
pendence manifesting intelligent will, is as determinable in the succession of races 
as in the development and organization of the individual. Generations do not 
vary accidentally in any and every direction, but in pre-ordained, definite, and cor- 
related courses." 

We might multiply citations, but these are sufficient to refute the 
claims made by French and German writers that Darwinism de- 
stroys the proof from design of the being and government of God. 
Logically it cannot have any such effect. 

Mr. Darwin concludes his book on the Origin of Species thus : 

There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been 
originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms, or into one; and that, while 
this planet has been circling on, according to the fixed law of gravity, from so 
simple a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, have been 
and are being evolved. 

On the preceding page he speaks of laws enforced by the Creator. 

The very moment evolution is proved the theologians will be able to 
shozv that it stands in harmony with all theology zvortli preserving. 
But they are not called to show harmony between what is true and 
what is merely conjectural. 

Nor is it a question of sentiment. We may agree with Professor 
Rudolph Schmid, who, in his Theories of Darwin and their Relations 
to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality, says that he 

thinks it "infinitely insignificant whether the earthly matter out of which God 
formed man, who is dust of the earth, was an animal organization or not " (p. 315). 
"The question . . . whether 7nan s connection with the ground is brought about 
through the form of a preceding animal organism or ?iot is no longer of wi- 
portance" (p. 318). He thinks it just as dignified to have an animal ancestry as 
to have an ancestry of dirt ; he sees no ground for the sentimental opposition to 
animal descent as to our bodies, because "brutes" are so ugly, wicked, hideous, 
etc., for "mankind has stains uglier than those which disfigure the wildest beast 
of prey, and also traits so noble that man need not be ashamed of them " (p. 319). 
He says, " It is certainly a right feeling to which Darwin, in his Descent of Man, 
gives expression when he says : « For my own part I would as soon be descended 
from that heroic little monkey who braved his dreaded enemy in order to- save the 
life of his keeper, or from that old baboon who, descending from the mountains, 
6 



82 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs, as 
from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, prac- 
tices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, 
and is haunted by the grossest superstitions ' " (p. 319).* 

IV.— RE-ADJUSTMENT OF TERMS. 

With such a state of opinion does it not seem to be time to make a 
re-adjustment of the terms used, so as to avoid confusion ? The whole 
discussion would proceed in a more orderly and intelligible way if 
we did not assign to one word two very distinct if not contradictory 
meanings. The word " evolution " is employed to mean sometimes 
theism and sometimes atheism. 

The saying that there maybe a theory of so-called evolution com- 
patible with a belief in a Creator does not preclude the saying that 
there may be an anti-theistic theory of evolution. The fact is that 
where there has been opposition made to the theory on religious 
grounds, such opposition has always been excited by a very appar- 
ent zeal, upon the part of those opposed by religious people, to use 
whatever seemed in favor of evolution in order to oppose the the- 
istic idea. There is a doctrine of evolution which is atheistic. That 
which requires the eternity of matter plainly is such. That which 
excludes the efficient superintendence of a personal Originator of 
force plainly is such. Those who hold such a theory have to carry 
the burden of their opposition to the religious intuitions of man- 
kind, as well as the burden of having to gather such proofs of their 
theory as will satisfy the scientific mind. And it is not to be for- 
gotten that those religious intuitions of mankind are as much facts 
demanding the attention of science as the processes of human think- 
ing or animal respiration. 

Very much confusion would be avoided if, hereafter, all who speak 
and Write on the subject would use the words " evolution " and 
" development " as indicating the same process in nature, while 
" evolution " should exclude God and make the process in nature to 
be by nature, and " development " should always imply the theistic 
idea, describing a process going on among created things under the 
superintendence of their Creator. This distinction would promote 
clarity of thought. 

* Quoted by Rc-v. J. W. Flian, Southern Presbyterian Review, 1885, p. 522. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 83 

In any case the propounder of a hypothesis must substantiate it. 

1. There may be no God and no evolution. 

2. There may be a God and no evolution. 

3. There may be an evolution and no God. 

4. There may be a God and some sort of evolution.* 

It is plain that a man may hold any one of these four proposi- 
tions. If the first, he calls upon theists to prove there is a God, and 
upon evolutionists to prove evolution. If the second, he demands 
of evolutionists the proof of evolution. If the third, he holds him- 
self bound to establish evolution, and to call upon theists to prove 
the existence of God. If the fourth, he commits himself to prove 
the existence of God and to show the truth of some kind of evolution- 
hypothesis. Observe that in every case the onus probandi falls on 
the evolutionists. No one is bound to show that the hypothesis is 
untrue. Its advocates must establish it. The question is simply 
this : Does evolution explain the universe in such a way as to be 
more consistent with most of the known facts, and is it freer from 
difficulties than any other theory? The doctrine of the law of 
gravitation was submitted to that test. It was found, and is still 
found, to have difficulties — as every proposition accepted as truth 
is known to have ; but it has fewer difficulties than any other the- 
ory on the same plane, and it consists with more known facts. 
Therefore it is accepted. If evolution can thus make good its claim 
it must be accepted. 

It is in a high degree illegitimate, and therefore unscientific, to 
assume that a hypothesis has been established because no one has 
proved its falsity. That only is to be regarded as a scientific hy- 
pothesis to which we have been led by a study of the facts of the 
universe. We must not discover an hypothesis and invent our facts — 
a process rather fashionable in our day — but we must discover the 
facts, and then invent some hypothesis f in which they can stand 
and leave room for other facts. Then, whenever the facts become 
too great a multitude to stand in the circle of our hypothesis, we 

* In that case should it not be called "development? " 

t After I had written the phrase "invent some hypothesis " I met it in Professor Huxley's 
Origin of Species, Lecture IV. " In order to explain or get at the cause of complex masses of 
phenomena we must invent an hypothesis, or make what seems a likely supposition respecting 
their cause." 



84 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

must increase the radius and so enlarge the space. Of two hypothe- 
ses, one of which embraces all the known facts of the universe except 
one, and the other embraces all the known facts, and then has room 
for the new-comer, the first hypothesis must be abandoned and the 
second must become an accepted theory, or scientific doctrine. 

V.— HYPOTHESIS. 

What is meant by " hypothesis ? " 

Sir William Hamilton defines it as a provisional reference of phe- 
nomena to some supposed class or cause, until the mind becomes 
satisfied to make the reference permanent, or is able to refer the 
phenomena to some other class or cause.* 

John Stuart Mill thus defines it: 

An hypothesis is any supposition which we make (either without actual evidence 
or on evidence assuredly insufficient) in order to endeavor to deduce from it con- 
clusions in accordance with facts which are known to be real ; under the idea that 
if the conclusions to which the hypothesis leads are known truths the hypothesis 
itself either must be, or at least is likely to be, true.f 

Dr. Gregory says : 

Hypothesis is often confounded with theory ; but hypothesis properly means the 
supposition of a principle of whose existence there is no proof from experience, 
but which may be rendered more or less probable by facts which are neither 
numerous enough nor adequate to infer its existence.^ 

Have we any criteria of legitimate hypothesis ? Almost all writers 
on the subject have furnished what they consider criteria, and we 
may therefore compile a code upon which there will be an approach 
to unanimity of acceptance. 

Hamilton, quoted by Rev. J. W. Flinn {Southern Presbyterian 
Review, April, 1885), gives several criteria of a good hypothesis in 
the tenth lecture of his Metaphysics, and in his discussion of the 
" Representative Theory of Perception " (Lecture XXVI.). They 
are in substance as follows : 1. The facts to be explained must really 
exist. Prove ghosts before explaining them. Establish an sit be- 
fore cur sit. 2. The phenomena cannot be explained by any known 
cause or principle. 3. The hypothesis must involve no internal or 

* Hamilton's Metaphysics, p. 117. 

t System of Logic, 4th edition, book iii., chapter iv. 

\ Fleming's Vocabulary of Philosophy. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 85 

external contradiction. It must be consistent with its parts, and 
not contradict other known truth. 4. It must explain the phenom- 
ena better than any known or supposed law or cause. 5. It must 
explain the phenomena simply and fully, independently of subsidiary 
hypotheses to help it out. 6. It must save the facts to be explained 
and not subvert, distort, or mutilate them. Professor Jevons,* in 
giving the requisites of a good hypothesis, considers " agreement 
with fact the sole and sufficient test of a true hypothesis" 
Professor Huxley {Origin of Species, Lecture VI.) says: 

We must, in the first place, be prepared to prove that the supposed causes of the 
phenomena exist in nature ; that they are what the logicians call vera causes — true 
causes ; in the next place, we should be prepared to show that the assumed causes 
of the phenomena are competent to produce such phenomena as those which we 
wish to explain by them ; and in the last place, we ought to be able to show that no 
other known causes are competent to produce these phenomena. If we can succeed 
in satisfying these three conditions we shall have demonstrated our hypothesis; 
or rather, I ought to say, we shall have proved it as far as certainty is possible for 
us ; for, after all, there is no one of our surest convictions which may not be upset, 
or at any rate modified, by a further accession of knowledge. 

The criterion given by Boyle of a legitimate hypothesis is that 
it should not be inconsistent with any other truth or phenomena of 
nature. 

Professor Clifford says : 

In order to make out that your supposition is true it is necessary to show, not 
merely that that particular supposition will explain the facts, but also that no other 
wztl.\ 

The question is whether there be any hypothesis of evolution 
which can satisfy these criteria. 

Davy (said Sir Lyon Playfair in his late presidental address to the British Asso- 
ciation for the Advancement of Science) described hypothesis as the mere scaffold- 
ing of science, useful to build up true knowledge, but capable of being put up or 
taken down at pleasure. Undoubtedly a theory is only temporary, and the reason 
is, as Bacon has said, that the man of science " loveth truth more than theory." 
The changing theories which the world despises are the leaves of the tree of science 
drawing nutriment to the parent stems, and enabling it to put forth new branches 
and to produce fruit ; and though the leaves fall and decay the very products of 
decay nourish the roots of the tree and re-appear in the new leaves or theories 
which succeed. When the questioning of nature by intelligent experiment has 
raised a system of science then those men who desire to apply it to industrial in- 
vention proceed by the same methods to make rapid progress in the arts. 

* Jevons's Principles of Scie?tce, book iv., chapter xxiii. 

t Coiiditions of Mental Development, Humboldt. Library edition, page 44. 



86 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

But no hypothesis can claim the dignity of a theory, and be main- 
tained as a scientific doctrine, so long as there are very many well- 
ascertained facts which cannot be accounted for by the hypothesis. 
This is admitted. To this unquestioned canon let us bring the 
hypothesis of evolution. 

VI.— TESTIMONY OF THE VEGETABLE WORLD. 

Any theory of evolution demands that there shall have been a 
gradual but steady development from rudest and simplest forms to 
most complete and complex forms, as a rule, and not as an excep- 
tion. Is that a fact as regards vegetables ? If so, shall we not find 
that the nearer we approach the beginning the ruder will the forms 
become, and the fewer the genera in proportion to the species ? 
This is what Mr. Darwin taught. Are there facts to sustain this 
theory ? If so, they must be found in the ancient rocks. The ap- 
peal is to geology. So far is geology from sustaining this view that 
it antagonizes it. Mr. Darwin felt the need of bringing geology 
into court as the witness that must know more of this matter than 
any other, and his witness so contradicted his theory that he was 
under the painful necessity of discrediting his own witness. (See 
Origin of Species, Chapter X.) Professor Huxley says in the Ency- 
clopedia Britannica, ninth edition : 

The only perfectly safe foundation for the doctrines of evolution is in the his- 
torical, or rather archaeological evidence, that particular organisms have arisen by 
the gradual modifications of their predecessors, which is furnished by fossil re- 
mains. 

We have the statement by the eminent Mr. W. Carruthers, F.R.S. 
(one of the highest authorities on fossil botany), that, 

Ferns, equisetums, and lycopods appear as far back as the old red sandstone (De- 
vonian), not in simple or more generalized, but in more complex structures than 
their living representatives, The earliest known conifers were well-developed trees, 
with woody structure and fruits as highly differentiated as those of their living 
representatives. 

This learned gentleman, in the closing lecture of a course recently 
delivered by him at Aberdeen, as the Thomson Science Lecturer 
for the year, discussed the question of the testimony of the plant 
record in the earth's strata to the origin of life and the genetic evo- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 87 

lution of species. He summed up the results of this testimony in 
the following words : 

The whole evidence supplied by fossil plants is, then, opposed to the hypothesis 
of o-enetic evolution, and especially the sudden and simultaneous appearance of the 
most highly organized plants at particular stages in the past history of the globe, 
and the entire absence among fossil plants of any forms intermediate between 
existing classes or families. The facts of paleontological botany are opposed to 
evolution, but they testify to development, to progression from lower to higher 
types.* The cellular algse preceded the vascular cryptograms and the gymno- 
sperms of the newer palaeozoic rocks, and these were speedily followed by mono- 
cotyledons, and at a much later period by dicotyledons. But the earliest repre- 
sentatives of these various sections of the vegetable kingdom were not generalized 
forms, but as highly organized as recent forms, and in many cases .more highly 
organized, and the divisions were as clearly bounded in their essential character, 
and as decidedly separated from each other, as they are at the present day. De- 
velopment is not the property of the evolutionist ; indeed, the Mosaic narrative — 
the oldest scheme of creation — which traces all nature to a supernatural Creator, 
represents the operations of that Creator as having been carried out in a series of 
developments, from the calling of matter into existence through the various stages 
of its preparation for life, and on through various steps in the organic world, until 
man himself is reached. The real question is, Does science give us any light as 
to how this development was accomplished ? Is it possible, from the record of 
organic life preserved in the sedimentary deposits, to discover the method or agent 
through the action of which the new forms appeared on the globe ? The rocks 
record the existence of the plant and animal forms, but as yet they have disclosed 
nothing whatever as to how these forms originated. 



VII.— TESTIMONY OF THE DAKOTA GROUP. 

On this subject there is a great volume in the library of the rock 
books of nature, from which much instruction may be gained. 
There is what is called the Dakota group; a formation of sandstone, 
described by Lesquereux as consisting of " reddish and yellow sand- 
stone, with variously colored clays, seams of impure lignite, and re- 
mains of fossil plants, the whole group holding a position at the base 
of the cretaceous series of the Northwest." If it occupied only a 
square mile, this Dakota group would be well worth the study of 
naturalists, but.it extends continuously from Texas to Greenland, 
and is from sixty to one hundred miles in breadth. Its fossil plants 
have been studied by American and European naturalists, including 
some who are acknowledged to be among the ablest naturalists in 



* It is to be noticed that the learned lecturer employs the terms " evolution " and "develop- 
ment " strictly in the manner suggested above, in the section on the " Re-adjustment of Terms." 



88 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

the world. The number of plant impressions is vast. The Rev. 
Mr. Harsha * says : 

So far as is known, there is no place on the earth where such precise and varied 
testimony can be gathered as to the relation between the flora of the present and 
that of the past in this formation. 

Professor Wilber says : 

The leaves here preserved in stone are so perfect that the skilled botanist at 
once recognizes every species, and makes his classification as readily as if he were 
dealing in the daily contributions gathered by a class in botany from our common 
groves in the month of June (see Wilber's Nebraska). 

Now, what do scientific men find in this great formation ? Four 
things, every one of which suggests a difficulty which must be re- 
moved before any known theory of evolution can be accepted as 
proved. 

1. It is manifestly essential to the evolution theory that the older 
any formation is the smaller must be the number of genera in pro- 
portion to species. It follows that " in the older we should find 
few and simple generic forms." " The few simple genera and many 
species should be prior to the many complex general and the com- 
paratively meager species." This is the theory of evolution. But 
nature flatly contradicts it, and over a continent, with capital letters 
a hundred miles high, writes, UNTRUE ! According to the geolo- 
gists the Dakota group is five million years old ; and in this old 
cretaceous formation, therefore, if evolution were true, the forms 
should be disorderly, and the genera few and the species many ; 
whereas, every thing is complete, the genera well marked, and the 
proportion of the genera to the species is as 72 to 130 — not quite 
two species to each genus. Does not this one fact seem fatal to 
the acceptance of the evolution theory as it now stands? 

2. If evolution be true the flora of any one formation will have a 
perceptible connection with the flora of the next and more ancient, 
formation from which it was evolved. But here, over thousands of 
square miles, we find a flora absolutely perfect, existing without 
any primordial germ or type out of which it could have been 

* Rev. William J. Harsha, A.M., contributed a brief but unusually important paper on the 
Dakota Group to the Presbyterian Review^ January, 1883, to which amplest acknowledgment of 
indebtedness is made. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 89 

evolved. The characteristic of this flora is the dicotyledon leaf. 
It is not scarce, but appears in measureless abundance. Now, that 
perfect leaf has been supposed by evolutionist naturalists to have 
been evolved through ages from ruder types, and to have made its 
first appearance certainly not earlier than the middle cretaceous 
formation, if so early. But here we find it far back in the Dakota 
group, and as perfect as it can be. The same is true of the other 
types in this group ; " they all come forth in perfection at their first 
appearance." It is not said that they were created. We are not to 
account for their appearance. But they are a gross impertinence to 
evolution. They came unevolved, and they came to stay; and they 
have stayed through these millenniums, and so long as they are 
there, if there were not another fact in nature antagonistic to the 
evolution theory, would not this be fatal ? 

3. The theory of evolution necessarily involves the agreement of 
any flora with the flora of any similar group. Similar groups are 
those produced at the same period of development. The flora of 
one being subjected to the same conditions, must, in main charac- 
teristics, agree with the other, if evolution be true ; but they do 
not. The disagreement of synchronous forms has been observed 
by geologists in various portions of the planet. It is not necessary 
here to say that the Dakato group gives a very remarkable empha- 
sis to this fact, which has ample place for itself in nature ; but has 
it any place in any known theory of evolution ? 

4. If evolution be true, the flora of to-day should be differ- 
ent from the flora of five million years ago, and be more complex. 
But the Dakota group shows us that the species of those far-off 
cycles and the species of to-day are identical. No noteworthy 
difference is discovered between the cedar, the poplar, the willow, 
the oak, the fig, the tulip, the spicewood, the sassafras, the walnut, 
the buckthorn, the sumac, the cinnamon, the apple, and the plum 
of to-day, and the same species of five million years ago. How 
much longer will evolutionists demand ? Is not all the ingenuity 
shown in Mr. Darwin's Origin of Species wasted, and worthless 
to establish his theory until some one will dig up and throw out 
of the planet every part, and even vestige, of the whole Dakota 
group? 



9 o 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



VIII.— TESTIMONY OF ANIMALS. 

Let us turn from plants to animals. After all that has been said 
about the origin of species we know, as Dorner has pointed out, that 
the lower animals have shown no advance in instinct, in notions, in 
memory, or in physical structure in the last several thousands of years. 
This undisputed fact shows that if evolution was ever the law of the 
universe, so far as the lower animals are concerned, it has probably 
ceased to be. When did it cease ? Why did it cease ? The evolu- 
tionist must answer both questions. If there be no sign of the proc- 
ess now going on among the lower animals, to say that it will com- 
mence hereafter is only a prophecy, and it is only so much of a 
prophecy as a mere guess. Who has the authority to prophesy? 
If there be no proof that the process will ever begin, and there be 
not a solitary proof that it is now going on, there must be the most 
conclusive proof that it operated in the production of the differentia 
of matter in the past. But where has that proof been produced ? 
If there were enough indication of the passage from the homoge- 
neous to the heterogeneous to produce the universe would there not 
be indications which would enable us to approximate the period 
when the process ceased ? But no evolutionist has been able to 
give us any information on this subject. On the contrary, Dr. 
Matheson, in his recent able book, has pointed out, and quotes in 
proof, an address of Sir John Lubbock, that 

since the opening of the human period we have no evidence whatever in the world 
of physical life of any operation of the evolution principle.* 

If testimony be sought from paleontology it is not forthcoming, 
but all we can learn from fossils seems to be on the other side. 
Professor Virchow, the great German authority, stated in his presi- 
dential address: 

But one thing I must say, that not a single fossil skull of an ape, or of an ape- 
man, has yet been found that could really have belonged to a human being. 
Every addition to the amount of objects which we have obtained as materials for 
discussions has removed us farther from the hypothesis propounded. 

And again : 

On the whole we must really admit that there is a complete absence of any 
fossil type of a lower stage in the development of man. Nay,, if we gather together 

* Can the Old Faith Live with the New ? By G. Matheson, D.D., page 208. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 9 I 

the whole sum of the fossil men hitherto known, and put them on a parallel with 
those of the present time, we can decidedly pronounce that there are among living 
men a much greater number of individuals who show a relatively inferior type than 
there are among the fossils known up to the present time. 

M. de Varigny, an evolutionist (in Nature, a scientific journal 
maintaining evolution), in reviewing Les Enchainements du Mondes 
Animal dans' les Temps Ge'ologique, written by M. Gaudry, Professor 
of Paleontology in the Museum of Natural History, Paris, also an 
evolutionist, uses the following language, which is important under 
the circumstances : 

A great deal has been written on the transformation theory of Lamarck and 
Darwin, and it must be expected that much more will be written. One of the prin- 
cipal objections made to it is that if man is really the descendant of the ape, and 
the ape that of other mammalia, if, generally, there exist links between all animals, 
living and extinct, so that all animals trace their origin to a common ancestor, how 
is it that no link really exists between man and ape, or between fish and frog, or 
between vertebrate and invertebrate ? Embryological considerations, it is said, 
show a real connection between very different animals ; a frog, for instance, is a 
fish for some time during its youth, and amphioxus looks very much like an as- 
eidian. 

But, notwithstanding numerous arguments to support Lamarck's theory, no 
transformist can show any species gradually losing its peculiar characters to ac- 
quire new ones belonging to another species, and thus transforming itself. How- 
ever similar the dog may be to the wolf, no one has found any dead nor living 
animal or skeleton which might as well be ascribed to wolf as to dog, and therefore 
be considered as being the link between the two. One may say exactly as much 
concerning the extinct species; there is no gradual and imperceptible passage 
from one to anothor. Moreover, the first animals that lived on this earth are not 
by any means those that one may consider as inferior and degraded. 

Mr. Darwin admits that the non-existence of the missing links 
would be fatal to his theory. If, then, Mr. Darwin admits, as he 
does, that none have been found, where is the foundation of evolu- 
tion?* 

The theory of evolution necessarily demands a very much smaller 
number of species in the earlier than in the later ages of the planet, 
since all animals, according to evolution, have been derived from a 
few, perhaps only two, original beings. But Agassiz {Structure of 

* As a scientific observer, an acute, laborious, profound student of nature, Darwin has no su- 
perior. The range of his researches, too, has been wonderful ; he has traveled over the world to 
sift materials ; he has recorded the results with a lucidity which leaves nothing to be desired ; and 
yet one can, with perfect logical consistency, admit the whole of his observed facts and reject the 
whole of his hypotheses. -^Rev. Dr. Porter, President of Queen's College, Belfast. 



92 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

Animal Life, p. 94) has shown that this is not the fact. By personal 
inspection he discovered that the whole Adriatic does not furnish at 
this day so many species of living fishes as there are of fossil fishes 
in a quarry near Verona ; and the fossil fishes he found in the neigh- 
borhood of Riga, on the Baltic, are more numerous than the present 
living species of the Baltic and German Oceans. The same is true 
of shells. The authorized geological survey of the State of New 
York disclosed " in each of the successive sets of beds within the 
area of the State as numerous a variety of shells as the sum total of 
all the species now living along the whole Atlantic coast of this con- 
tinent." Here is a very serious difficulty, so serious that it must 
preclude the establishment of any theory which cannot stand with- 
out the thesis that the planet once had a smaller diversity of an- 
imals than now exists. But that proportion is essential in evolu- 
tion. 

Then we ought to have a regular and systematically arranged 
order between every kind of species. But Professor Alleyne-Nich- 
olson, in his Manual of Zoology, says this is not the case, and he 
adds : 

For instance, vertebrates belong to a higher morphological type than mollusks, 
but the higher mollusks — for example, the cuttle-fish— are far more highly organ- 
ized, as far as their type is concerned, than the lowest vertebrate. Therefore, it is 
obvious that a linear classification is impossible, for the higher members of each 
subkingdom are more highly organized than the lower forms of the next ascend- 
ing subkingdom ; at the same time they are constructed upon a lower morpholog- 
ical type. 

The animal kingdom is divided into Radiates, Mollusks, Artic- 
ulates, and Vertebrates. If evolution be true the radiates must 
have preceded the next division by so long a time as was necessary 
to make so great a number of differentiations as would cause suf- 
ficient variations to produce mollusks. The same would be true as 
between mollusks and articulates. The same w 7 ould be true as be- 
tween articulates and vertebrates. Are those facts in nature ? No. 
Quite the opposite is the state of facts. In the oldest of the primary 
rocks we find all the four divisions of tlie animal kingdom ; in the 
Taconic bed of primary rocks all the classes of the radiates, all 
the classes of the mollusks, all but one of the classes of the 
articulates, and one of the classes of the vertebrates. So geology 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



93 



seems to cut off the terminus a quo of all existing systems of evo- 
lution. 

It is well to make the general notice that the basis of evolution is 
not laid upon what is scientifically known, but upon our ignorance. 
The theory is based mainly upon what we do not know. The man 
who wrote The Origin of Species by Natural Selection acknowledges 
that " our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound." (See 
Descent of Man, i, pp. 144, 187, 197.) Every thing in evolution de- 
pends upon " missing links." Now we are totally ignorant of the 
" links." We do not know that there are links ; we do know that 
what is indispensable to evolution is " missing." The advocates of 
evolution are in the position of the pleader who begs the court and 
jury to give his client a verdict because the witnesses who could 
testify to what is indispensable to establish the client's innocence 
cannot be found. 

Evolution accounts for neither gaps nor laps, but only for tran- 
sitionary types between preceding and succeeding species. But 
science has to do with the facts of nature, and the facts of nature 
show gaps and laps in abundance, but not the transitionary types. 
Those who maintain the materialistic forms of evolution are untiring 
in asserting that " such and such things must have been," because 
they assume that there can be no other theory of the universe than 
that of materialistic evolution. They do not seem to see that that 
very process. will shake the faith in their hypothesis of thoughtful 
persons, especially those who have the scientific instinct. The proc- 
ess of reasoning in such minds will be this: The expounders of the 
theory solemnly and deliberately and repeatedly affirm that if evolu- 
tion be true such and such a thing must be in nature ; but neither 
11 such " nor " such " a thing has been shown to be in nature ; there- 
fore the truth of evolution is not established. 

A comparison of the following tables will show how far evolution- 
ary theories and physical facts agree, both as to the original state of 
animal existence and its progressive appearanee upon the planet. 
A study of it may help to crystallize in some minds the important 
distinction between the natural and the artificial. 



94 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



Somehow as it would be in Evolution. 





Radiates. 


Mollusks. 


Articulates. 


Vertebrates. 
































Man 


> 
< 




























Marsu- 
pials 


Mam- 
mals 




























Birds 




H 
























Rep- 
tiles 






Cretace- 




















Fishes 




>: 




















In- 
sects 






















Crus- 
tacea 





















Worms 




w: 


Carbon- \ 
iferous \ 

'Devonian. 












Cepha- 
lopoda 














Gas- 

poda 




> 








Ace- 
phala 




I- 








Echin- 
oderm 




Ph 


Taconic. . 


Poly- 
pes 


Aca- 
lephs 





As Agassiz says it is in Nature. 





Radiates. 


Mollusks. 


Articulates. 


Vertebrates. 


> 

< 
p < 

K 

a 
H 
































Pliocene.. 
Miocene . . 


























Mam- 
mals 

Marsu- 
pials 




> 

X 

< 
Q 

4. ' 

O 

U 

w 

CO 


'Cretace- 
ous 




















































Birds 




Permian. . 

Carbon- \ 
iferous ( 

'Devonian. 

Silurian... 

Cambrian. 
.Taconic. 


















In- 
sects 


Fishes 


Rep- 
tiles 




> 

1 

« 


Poly- 
pes 


Aca- 
lephs 


Echin- 
oderm 


Ace- 
phala 


Gas- 
tero- 
poda 


Cepha- 
lopoda 


Worms 


Crus- 
tacea 





FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 95 

IX.— THE EXISTENCE OF INSTINCT. 

There is a large department of animal actions having their origin 
in what we call instinct, and the existence of instinct creates a very 
great difficulty to the adoption of the theory of evolution. 

Instinct has been defined as a 

special internal impulse, urging animals to the performance of certain actions which 
are useful to them or to their kind, but the use of which they do not themselves 
perceive, and their performance of which is a necessary consequence of their being 
placed in certain circumstances .* 

Instinctive actions are not due to mechanical or chemical causes, 
nor to the intelligence, experience, or will, as has been shown by 
M. Lemoine. f He points out that these actions, which take place 
with a general fixity and precision, are generally present in all 
the individuals of each species, and can be perfectly performed 
the very first time their actions are called for. Very plainly, there- 
fore, instinct cannot in any sense be due to habit, and instinctive 
action is not performed more easily the millionth time than it is 
the first. 

There is no intelligence involved, for, in the first place, the use of 
an instinctive action is not perceived by him who performs it, nor 
does he choose the method of its performance ; and there are some 
instances in which if the animal had choice he would certainly not 
perform that action to which he is impelled by instinct. A new-born 
babe exerts no intelligence in sucking and swallowing the first time 
those acts are performed; and of course it is not then assisted by habit. 
It is not denied that habits maybe inherited ; it is only affirmed that 
there are instinctive actions which cannot be habits. The theory of 
lapsed intelligence cannot account for the instinctive actions going 
on at present under our eyes, both in ourselves and in other animals. 
This theory assumes that wasps, bees, ants, and other animals once 
exercised a conscious, deliberate, discriminating faculty in their per- 
formance of the actions which we call instinct. It would be a vi- 
olent supposition that a female instinctively foresees what would be 
the first necessity of her new offspring when those necessities are so 
different from her own, or that she has carried a remembrance of 

* Todd's Cyclopcedia of Anatomy and Physiology, vol. iii, p. 3. 
\ L? Habitude et V Instinct, Balliere, Paiis, 1875. 



9 6 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

what was her first necessity the instant she came into conscious ex- 
istence. 

In regard to " natural selection," all that Mr. Darwin has done 
has been to show change of instincts already acquired. This 
puts us only a step back ; it does not account for the origin of in- 
stinct, where the whole weight of our argument lies. 

Mr. Mivart,* in speaking of the theory that some action was per- 
formed instantly, and this inherited, brings forward the following 
case : 

There is the case of the wasp, sphex, which stings spiders, caterpillars, and 
grasshoppers exactly in the spot or spots where their ganglia lie, and so paralyzes 
them. Even the strongest advocate of the intelligence of insects would not affirm 
that the mother sphex has a knowledge of the comparative anatomy of the nervous 
system of these very diversely formed insects. According to the doctrine of nat- 
ural selection either an ancestral wasp must have accidentally stung them in the 
right place, and so our sphex of to-day is the naturally selected descendant of a 
line of insects which inherited this lucky tendency to sting different insects differ- 
ently, but always in the exact situation of their nervous ganglia ; or else the young 
of the ancestral sphex originally fed on dead food, but the offspring of some indi- 
viduals, who happened to sting their prey so as to paralyze, but not kill them, were 
better nourished, and so the habit grew. But the incredible supposition that the 
ancestor should accidentally have acquired the habit of stinging different insects 
differently, but always in the right spot, is not eliminated by the latter hypothesis. 

Now, according to evolution, whatever exists must have sprung 
from something with which it is still connected — that is to say, evo- 
lution demands continuity of development. Here we have whole 
classes of actions, performed by all kinds of animals, to which they 
are impelled by what we call instinct, and evolution has not been 
able to find a place for instinct. 

X.— LANGUAGE. 

The races of inferior animals which existed six thousand years 
ago ought to have made some appreciable approach by this time to 
what man was then, while man should have advanced. But the 
facts show that it is not so. Between a gorilla and Laura Bridg- 
man, for instance, what a chasm ! She is almost entirely cut off 
from the use of the five senses, and yet her intellect is compara- 
tively highly developed ; while the most lively of all the inferior 

* In an article entitled " Organic Nature's Riddle," Fortnightly Review, 1885. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 97 

animals can only be taught some tricks of imitation. The gorilla is 
said to possess vocal organs similar to the human. He has had 
them as long as man — longer, according to some evolutionists — and 
yet he cannot form a language, nor, so far as we know, even be 
taught a language, nor the notes of music. 

Professor Max Miiller, in a very interesting article on " Forgotten 
Bibles," in the Nineteenth Century, 1885, writing of this topic, says : 

As language had been pointed out as a Rubicon which no beast had ever 
crossed, Darwin lent a willing ear to those who think that they can derive lan- 
guage — that is, real logos, from interjections and mimicry, by a process of spon- 
taneous evolution, and produced himself some most persuavive arguments. We 
know how able, how persuasive, a pleader Darwin could be. When he wished to 
show how man could have descended from an animal which was born hairy and 
remained so during life,* he could not well maintain that an animal without hair 
was fitter to survive than an animal with hair. He therefore wished us to believe 
that our female semi-human progenitors lost their hair by some accident, were, as 
Hermann said, " minus belluinae facie et indole," and that in the process of sexual 
selection this partial or complete baldness was considered an attraction, and was 
thus perpetuated from mother to son. It was difficult, no doubt, to give up Mil- 
ton's Eve for a semi-human progenitor, suffering, it may be, from leprosy or leu- 
coderma, yet Darwin, like Gottfried Hermann, nearly persuaded us to do so. 
However, in defending so hopeless, or, at all events, so unfortified a position as 
the transition of the cries of animals into the language of man, even so great a 
general as Darwin undoubtedly was will occasionally encounter defeat, and I be- 
lieve I may say without presumption, that, to speak of no other barrier between 
man and beast, the barrier of language remains as unshaken as ever, and renders 
every attempt at deriving man genealogically from any known or unknown ape, 
for the present, at least, impossible, or, at all events, unscientific. 

XI.— GENIUS. 

A theory of universology must not only not stand contradicted 
by plain and unquestionable and manifold phenomena of nature, 
but it must account, in some measure, for all the most noteworthy 
things that are. Does it ? 

In the department of the human mind there is such a thing as genius. 
It is universally acknowledged. What it is no man may know. 
There may be great differences in the results of attempts at defin- 
ing it, but all observers perceive that it is different from every thing 
else. It is more easy to tell zvhat it is not than what it is. It is 
not power of perception, or comparison, or reasoning, or memory, 

* Descent of Man, vol. ii., p. 377, where more details may be found as to the exact process of 
baldness or denudation in animals. 

7 



98 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

or fancy, or imagination ; nor is it admitted to be the product of all 
these. Yet it uses all these, and quickens them, and is superior to 
them. How is it produced ? Heredity can be employed by evolu- 
tion to account for physical and mental traits. The run of pro- 
clivities, propensities, tendencies, talents, may be accounted for by 
heredity and traced down successive descendants of families. But 
where does genius come from ? Sometimes — not often — it falls on 
a member of a family which has exhibited talent. Usually it comes 
on the man who has had no ancestor distinguished from the mass of 
men. He starts like a star out of a rayless sky. Genius comes 
parentless and goes childless. Genius is the Melchisedeck of mind, 
" without father, without mother, without descent." In an article 
by M. Caro, of the Institute of France, in the Revue des deitx Mondes, 
in which he exposes the fallacies of Galton's " Heredity of Genius," 
he says : 

Those sovereign minds, precisely by what they possess that is incommunicable, 
rise high and alone above the floods of generations which precede and follow 
them. . . . Those exalted originals who tower above mankind have no fathers 
and no sons in the blood. 

If evolution be true, genius would be the product of what went 
before and would carry the results of previous mental progress in- 
volved in itself to be evolved into other genius. But the fact is 
against the theory, and no theory of evolution can be accepted as 
established until it puts itself in harmony with the fact of the exist- 
ence of genius. 

XII— THE MORAL SENSE. 

The existence of the moral sense in man is as acknowledged a 
phenomenon as the existence of the vertebral column in his body. 
Humanity is universally conscious of a distinction between right 
and wrong. This moral sense creates the demand for an ethical 
system which shall be suited to all times and places in which hu- 
manity can exist. For the origin of this moral sense evolution has 
no explanation, and it can find in nature no " data for ethics " 
against which the moral sense of mankind does not rebel. The at- 
tempt of Mr. Darwin to explain the former, and of Mr. Spencer to 
produce the latter, have been such philosophic failures as to be 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 99 

almost ludicrous. The platform of evolution is wholly mechanical, 
and, therefore, necessarily excludes the idea of morality. Nothing 
can be mechanical and moral at the same time. What is done me- 
chanically is not a deed for which the machine can be responsible. 
That which a man does voluntarily, that deed of his which was not 
produced through him by any antecedent or external or irresistible 
cause, that which has its causation wholly in his unforced volition, is 
that for which he can be held responsible. Now, there is the possi- 
bility of the performance of such a voluntary action or there is not. 
If any of the existing theories of evolution be true there is no 
such possibility ; but every human being has the consciousness of 
such possibility, and so it has come to pass that every existing hy- 
pothesis of evolution, however it may have succeeded in making an 
image on the mirror of the intellect, has failed to make the moral 
sense of men perceive that it has existence as a moral reality. Even 
Mr. Darwin admits that " free-will is a mystery insoluble to the 
naturalist." 

Moreover, there is in mankind a feeling that morality is both 
universal and immortal. It is not for one clime or one planet, 
one generation, or one race, and it is not dependent on any thing 
that can perish. It gathers its prodigious power from the belief in 
man that it is not tribal nor ethnic, that it is not municipal nor 
national, that it is not ancient nor modern, that it has always been 
so and will always be so. The imperishability of heroic righteous- 
ness is the faith in which have been performed all those deeds 
which have made way for liberty and civilization, and have ren- 
dered the doers glorious in the sight of succeeding generations. But 
if evolution be true there is no such thing. Whatever by ingenious 
arrangement can be made to take on the semblance of moral good- 
ness is to perish. Evolution teaches, according to Mr. Leslie 
Stephen, that all progress is mechanical, that progress is a stage of 
evolution, that evolution means a continuous process of adjustment, 
that this signifies that the existing adjustment is imperfect, that the 
moment the adjustment becomes perfect man will have reached the 
highest arc of the curve, " after which he could only expect de- 
scent." Professor Goldwin Smith {Contemporary Review) called at- 
tention to the fact that the late Professor Clifford distinctly looked 



IOO CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

forward to a catastrophe in which man and all his works will perish, 
and that Mr. Herbert Spencer believes the same. Now, if all a 
man's acts which seem to him to have in them a moral quality 
have no further reach nor longer endurance than those which are 
merely involuntary, like his heart-beats, or those which are mani- 
festly morally colorless, as the length to which he lets his hair or 
or nails grow, if all that we associate with goodness, self- 
sacrifice, heroism, has no greater heritage in the future than the 
most indifferent acts performable by an animal, all being alike the 
products of mere machine, then there can be no basis of morality, 
and of course, no data for a science of ethics. The idea of an 
evolutionists talking of " data of ethics " involves a ridiculous 
absurdity. 

Mr. Darwin admits that " free-will is a mystery insoluble to the 
naturalists," and Professor Tyndall says that the chasm between 
the brain action and consciousness is impassable, that, 

here is the rock on which materialism must split whenever it pretends to be a 
complete philosophy of the human mind.* 

XIII.— ETERNITY OF MATTER. 

Does not a theory of evolution which places its account of the uni- 
verse wholly in matter with its potencies necessarily involve the 
eternity of matter ?f In addition to all the burdens to be carried 
by every other theory of evolution this theory assumes other loads. 
One is this : Eternity of matter is as difficult to conceive, as well as 
to prove, as is the eternity of mind. Mind is the product of matter. 
Matter is the product of mind. Here are two statements, both of 
which cannot be true. The question arises, which theory will most 
easily account for the greater number of phenomena ? If it can- 
not be assumed that by proving either we can displace the other, 
if both be equally beyond demonstration, we must take that which 
gives the easier explanation of the universe. The theory that mind 
preceded matter certainly does this. 

But, for the argument's sake, suppose matter to be eternal ; then 

*See Munger's Freedom of Faith y pp. 226, 227. 

t Tyndall says: " The law of conservation rigidly excludes both creation and annihilation" 
{Annual of Scientific Discovery, 1864, p. 79). 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. IO i 

all its potencies and possiblities must be co-eternal, or must have 
entered into or been placed in matter at some definite period. Did 
they enter matter ? If so, where were they before they so entered ? 
And how did they get in ? If they had no previous existence, then 
they were created. If they were created that fact takes away all 
difficulty from the supposition that matter itself was created. If 
they were not created they were co-eternal with matter. 

The supposition that matter with force is eternal is an immense 
weight for any theory to carry ; for we must remember what " eter- 
nal" means — millenniums written in figures, each one of which mul- 
tiplying all its predecessors by ten, and standing in a line billions 
of times longer than the greatest distance between the two most 
remote fixed stars, would be but as a grain of sand to the universe 
in any attempt to represent eternity. Now whatever force or forces 
is or are at present at work to differentiate existing matter, to pro- 
mote development, to give even the suggestion of evolution, must 
on this theory have been eternally at work. The homogeneous 
must have been eternally becoming the heterogeneous ; the simple 
must have been eternally becoming the complex ; the rude and in- 
choate must have eternally been becoming the complete and perfect. 
But this is inconceivable, because it necessarily involves the concept 
of a thing being synchronously one thing and another, simple and 
complex, and, while being both at the same time, passing from one 
to the other — three states in which no one thing can possibly be 
conceived to be at any one moment. 

But, suppose we are obstructed by the barriers of our intellectual 
limitations from going back measurelessly into the eternity past, 
the evolutionist can, in imagination, retreat many millions of years 
along the banks of the stream which has no source, and jump in 
somewhere with his theory. If the theory of evolution now con- 
sidered be true the law of nature demands that all things must be 
developing from the rude to the perfect, from the simple to the 
complex, from the lower to the higher, from the inorganic to the 
organic, from the lifeless to the living, from the simplest living proto- 
zoic cells to Shakespeares and Newtons. Each variation may have 
required millions of years, and there may have been billions of 
these variations to bring the drop of protoplasm up to the poet or 



I0 2 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

philosopher. But we can furnish a million times as much duration as 
may be required because we have eternity at our command in the 
argument. But, all at once, it occurs to us that the stages of progress 
on which we stand must have been reached eternal ages ago, and that 
through those eternal years the physical and intellectual universe 
should have ascended until the system had reached its consummate 
flowering, and every living thing become a man, and every man an 
angel, and angelic nature have developed through the eternities until 
there should have appeared an infinite God, and that divine product 
should have had eternal personal existence. The theory of evolu- 
tion, which by the assumption of the eternity of matter starts with 
excluding any God, necessitates the existence of an eternal God. 
Nay, more. If from the inorganic could be evolved the lowest form 
of organism in which life could reside, and if from that lowest form 
man could be evolved, and not only a specimen man, but the num- 
berless multitudes of men which we call mankind — why not from 
this great and innumerable human race have been evolved in the 
lapsing eternities an unlimited number of perfect beings — that is, of 
gods? If that form of the evolution theory which demands the 
eternity of matter be true then polytheism must be true, and there 
must be an innumerable company of perfect gods still evolving into 
something better and higher than perfect godhood. An eternity- 
of-matter evolution that stops short of this absurdity commits log- 
ical suicide. If evolution has been eternally in progress it must eter- 
nally progress. An evolution which has beginning must have an 
end. An evolution which has an end must have a beginning. An 
evolution which has either beginning or end is no evolution ; it is 
merely a limited development theory ; and that is a totally different 
thing, and is not now under discussion. 

XIV— RELATION OF EVOLUTION TO SCIENCE. 

Evolutionists who are not atheists require time, if they do not 
demand eternity. Thus, Mr. Darwin's theory of " Natural Selec- 
tion," according to his own statements, on a calculation made by so 
competent a person as Mr. St. George Mivart, required two thou- 
sand five hundred millions of years, since life began on the planet, 
for such accretion of infinitesimal variations in succeeding genera- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



103 



tions as would be necessary to bring the flora and fauna of the 
planet to their present state. But physical astromomy shows that 
the earth has not been able to sustain life more than probably ten 
millions of years. 

We give one view of this subject stated in the words of Sir Will- 
iam Thomson : 

To get a superior limit to the possible deviation of something not very different 
from the present state of things on the earth other sciences than geology must be 
appealed to ; and here because, and only because, our scientific men are usually 
mere specialists, the natural philosopher is required. What can a geologist, as 
such, tell about the nature, origin, and duration of the sun's heat? Yet suppose 
it could be shown that ten million years ago the sun was very much hotter than it 
now is, would not that fact have an important bearing on the length of time dur- 
ing which plants and animals have inhabited the earth ? What can he tell us 
about the internal heat of the earth, and the rate at which it is at present being 
lost? Yet if it could be shown, on strict physical principles, that ten millions of 
years ago the underground temperature was at least that of red heat at a depth of 
one thousand feet below the surface, would not that materially influence his specu- 
lations ? He may tell the mathematician to " mind his own business," but the 
mathematician must reply, " My business is in this case to save you from ignorantly 
committing egregious blunders, which not only retard the progress of your own 
science, but tend to render all science a laughing-stock to the uninitiated." 

After going over the evidence which overturns the popular geol- 
ogy he sums up thus : 

" Now, here is direct opposition between physical astronomy and modern 
geology, as represented by a very large, very influential, and I may add, in many 
respects philosophical and sound body of investigators, constituting, perhaps, a 
majority of British geologists. // is quite certain that a mistake has been ?nade ; 
that British popular theology at the present time is in direct opposition to the 
principles of natural philosophy." * 

Professor Tait, of Edinburgh, speaking in regard to this point, says : 

The subject [how long the earth has been habitable for plants and animals] has 
been taken up very carefully within the last few years by Sir William Thomson. . . . 
He divides his argument upon it into three heads. The first is an argument from 
the internal heat of the earth ; the second is from the tidal retardation of the 
earth's rotation ; and the third is from the sun's temperature. . . . Each of these 
arguments is quite independent of the other two, and is— for all tend to something 
about the same — to the effect that ten millions of years is about the utmost that 
can be allowed, from the physical point of view, for all the changes that have 
taken place on the earth's surface since vegetable life of the lowest form was capa- 
ble of existing here. ... I dare say many of you are acquainted with the specu- 
lations of Lyell and others, especially of Darwin, who tell us that even for a com- 

* North British Review, No. C. 



104 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



paratively brief portion of recent geological history three hundred millions of years 
will not suffice ! . . . Physical considerations, from various independent points 
of view, render it utterly impossible that more than ten or fifteen millions of years 
can be granted. * 

Now these are the results in which Sir William Thomson and 
Professor Tait, two of the foremost modern mathematical physi- 
cists, concur. Dr. Croll questions the exact trustworthiness of 
some of Sir William's calculations, but he himself says : 

The general conclusion to which we are therefore led from physical considera- 
tions regarding the age of the sun's heat is that the entire geological history of 
our globe must be comprised within less than one hundred millions of years. t 

Darwin felt and acknowledged this " formidable objection," and 
apparently has no solution to offer except the supposition of" violent 
changes, causing a more rapid rate of development.^ And this, in face 
of the fact that natural selection can admit of no " leaps" or "gaps."§ 

If continuous evolution is true, and matter contains, by reason of 
being matter, the " promise and potency " of man, then man must 
have had for ancestor some being that stands between himself and 
the animal next most likely to have been his progenitor. The ape 
has been accepted as representing that thing, but there then came 
the fatal necessity of finding an animal, or animals, supplying the in- 
dispensable "missing link" or links. This is very unscientific. 
Science depends upon the known, upon what has been found, not 
upon the unknown, upon that which has not been found, upon that 
which has no proof of being in existence except in the mind of the 
thinker, and probably would never have been there except that the 
thinker's hypothesis demanded it. To prove evolution it is assumed 
as a fact that certain things exist because evolution (the very thesis 
to be proved) demands their existence. And that is sometimes set 
forth as science ! It is assumed that if a certain witness be in 
existence, and he could be called into court, he would testify to certain 
things, which must be true, on the advocate's theory of the inno- 
cence of the accused. Is it not plain that the prosecution has as 

* Recent Advances in Physical Science, p. 165. 
+ Climate and Time, p. 355. 
\ Origin of Species, p. 286, sixth edition. 

§ Natural selection can never take a great and sudden leap, but must advance by short and 
sure, though slow steps. — Darwin : Oi'igin of Species, p. 156. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 105 

much right to assume that the testimony of the supposititious 
witness would be on the other side ? 

We have been waiting so long for " the missing link " that some 
impatience should be allowable. To keep us patient until the 
" missing link " can be found we have had our attention called to 
every new skull found in caves or other out-of-the-way places. That 
has been proclaimed as the missing link. But the fact is, the brain 
of the highest anthropoid ape proves to be only about one third of 
the human brain mass. Here is the case as stated by Wallace : 

The few remains yet known of prehistoric man do not indicate any material dim- 
inution in the size of the brain-case. A Swiss skull of the stone age, found in 
the lake dwelling of Meilen, corresponded exactly to that of a Swiss youth of the 
present day. The celebrated Neanderthal skull had a larger circumference than 
the average ; and its capacity, indicating actual mass of brain, is estimated to have 
been not less than seventy-five cubic inches, or nearly the average of existing Aus- 
tralian crania. The Engis skull, perhaps the oldest known, and which, according 
to Sir John Lubbock, " there seems no doubt was really contemporary with the 
mammoth and the cave-bear," is yet, according to Professor Huxley, "a fair average 
skull, which might have belonged to a philosopher or might have contained the 
thoughtless brains of a savage." Of the cave-men of Les Eyzies, who were un- 
doubtedly contemporary with the reindeer in the South of France, Professor Paul 
Broca says : " The great capacity of the brain, the development of the frontal 
region, the fine elliptical form of the anterior part of the profile of the skull, are 
incontestable characteristics of superiority such as we are accustomed to meet 
with in civilized races."* 

Professor Virchow says : 

When we study the fossil man of the quaternary period, who must, of course, 
have stood comparatively near to our primitive ancestors in the order of descent, 
or rather ascent, we find always a man, just such men as are now. . . . The old 
troglodyte, pile-villagers, and bog-people prove to be quite a respectable society. 
They have heads so large that many a living person would only be too happy to 
possess such. . . . Nay, if we gather together the whole sum of the fossil men 
hitherto known, and put them parallel with those of the present time, we can 
decidedly pronounce that there are among living men a much larger number of 
individuals who show a relatively inferior type than there are among the fossils 
known up to this time. . . . Every addition to the amount of objects which we 
have attained as materials for discussion has removed us further from the hypoth- 
esis propounded, t 

XV. -THE ATOMIC THEORY. 

The atomic theory seems fatal to evolution. The atoms, or, if 
you choose, the molecules, of which all matter is composed, have 

* Wallace : Contribzitions to the Theory of Natural Selection, p. 336,/. 
+ The Freedom of Science in the Modern State, p. 63. 



106 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

never changed their properties. It is inconsistent with the concept 
of " atom " that it should ever have been larger or smaller. There 
are no " natural " causes for this state of things, but the state is 
manifest. If evolution were a universal law atoms would be subject 
to it ; but atoms, by their essential constitution, cannot be subject 
to the law of evolution ; the conclusion is manifest. Moreover, the 
exact equality of all molecules, and of each to all others, shows, as 
Sir John Herschel pointed out, " the essential character of a manu- 
factured article," and therefore cannot have been evolved, and can- 
not be eternal. 

The late gifted and lamented Professor Clifford said : 

If there is any name among contemporary natural philosophers to whom is due 
the reverence of all true students of science it is that of Professor Clerk Maxwell. 

From Professor Maxwell's very remarkable " Discourse on Mole- 
cules," delivered before the British Association, at Bradford, Sep- 
tember, 1873, the following important extract is taken: 

In the heavens we discover by their light, and by their light alone, stars so dis- 
tant from each other that no material thing can ever have passed from one to 
another ; and yet this light, which is to us the sole evidence of the existence of 
these distant worlds, tells us also that each of them is built up of molecules of the 
same kinds as those which we find on earth. A molecule of hydrogen, for ex- 
ample, whether inSirius or in Arcturus, executes its vibrations in precisely the same 
time. 

Each molecule, therefore, throughout the universe bears impressed upon it the 
stamp of a metric system as distinctly as does the meter of the archives at Paris 
or the double royal cubit of the temple of Karnac. 

No theory of evolution can be formed to account for the similarity of molecules, 
for evolution necessarily implies continuous change, and the molecule is incapable 
of growth or decay, of generation or destruction. 

None of the processes of Nature, since the time when Nature began, have pro- 
duced the slightest difference in the properties of any molecule. We are, there- 
fore, unable to ascribe either the existence of the molecules or the identity of their 
properties to any of the causes which we call natural. 

On the other hand, the exact equality of each molecule to all others of the same 
kind gives it, as Sir John Herschel has well said, the essential character of a manu- 
factured article, and precludes the idea of its being eternal and self -existent. 



XVI.— SPONTANEOUS GENERATION. 

If the theory of evolution is to be accepted it must take in the 
whole universe. A "link" does not help us ; we want links which 
all belong to the same chain, and enough to make a chain. Phys- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



107 



ical organisms must have arisen from the very lowest conceivable 
type into all the perfections known among them, and then they 
must have been able to take on life. Have they ever done so? 
This makes the hypothesis of spontaneous animal generation indis- 
pensable. Evolution stands or falls with it. Why should evolu- 
tionists be wasting their time in showing the differentiations among 
vegetables on the one hand and animals on the other? Grant 
every thing that has been claimed in those departments, and a thou- 
sand-fold as much, and nothing would be gained ior evolution, what- 
ever light might be thrown upon development. If evolution be true 
our ancestors ought constantly through the ages to have been wit- 
nessing, not only uncountable numbers of cases in which vegetables 
and animals have been passing and have passed from one species to 
another, and it ought to be a phenomenon common to contem- 
poraneous observation, but, in addition, spontaneous generation 
ought not to be now an uncommon phenomenon, and the records 
of the past should abound with cases. Paleontology should furnish 
facts fixed in the rocks to sustain this hypothesis. No man should 
be called upon to disprove it ; its supporters must prove it by giv- 
ing such multiplied cases of its occurrence as to show 7 that it is the 
rule in the case, not the exception. Have they done so? On the 
contrary, not a single instance has ever been exhibited. If any thing 
has been supposed to be a case of spontaneous generation in our 
day it has been proved, on the examination of competent scientists, 
to be simply a case of life from previous life, and not at all the 
passage of the non-living inorganic into the living organic existence. 
Pasteur and Lionel Beale, Virchow and Tyndall, unite in testifying 
that there never has yet been discovered any proof of any case of 
spontaneous generation. 

In making the experiments by wmich Bastian and Haeckel sup- 
posed they had shown spontaneous generation they employed great 
heats to destroy all existing forms of life from the space in which 
they claim that life afterward spontaneously appeared. They either 
did so destroy life or they did not. If they did not, then there was 
no spontaneous generation. If they did, then what afterward ap- 
peared could not have come in the way of evolution. Now, the 
original living thing was on the planet before its greatest heat 



108 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

period, or else appeared thereafter. If the former, and it passed 
through all the fierceness of that heat, then the experimenters 
mentioned above killed nothing by heat, and so their experiments 
proved nothing ; if it was introduced after the greatest heat period 
then life came ab extra, and not by evolution. 

If a single instance could be found it would be a greater miracle 
than would be exhibited by a living man's calling a dead man to 
life. In the latter case the corpse would have an organism not only 
adapted to life but also having already had the habits of life, and 
the vital force would be sent into it ab extra, from a life already in 
existence. But in the former case it would be a thing without life 
performing what could be done only by a thing with life that itself 
might become a living thing. 

Herbert Spencer {First Principles, p. 32) : 

To conceive self-creation is to conceive potential existence passing into actual 
existence by some inherent necessity, which we cannot do. We cannot form any 
idea of a potential existence of the universe, as distinguished from its actual exist- 
ence. . . . We have no state of consciousness answering to the words — an in- 
herent necessity by which potential existence became actual existence. To render 
them into thought, existence, having for an indefinite period remained in one form, 
must be conceived as passing without any external or additional impulse into 
another form ; and this involves the idea of a change without a cause ; a thing of 
which no idea is possible. 

Still, this would be no valid objection if a case could be produced. 
There is no gain in discussing the question whether or not A killed 
B until it be shown that B is at least dead. 

There will probably be admitted to be no more trustworthy tes- 
timony on questions of science than that of Professor Lionel S. Beale, 
F.R.S., and he says : 

There are no scientific facts which can at all warrant the conclusion that non- 
living matter only, under any conceivable circumstances, can be converted into 
living matter, or at any previous time has, by any combination, or under any con- 
ditions that may have existed, given rise to the formation of any thing which pos- 
sesses, or has possessed, life. 

Professor Huxley says: 

Not only is the kind of evidence adduced in favor of abiogenesis [non-living pro- 
ducing living] logically insufficient to furnish proof of its occurrence, but it may be 
stated as a well-proved induction that the more careful the investigator, and the 
more complete his mastery over the endless practical difficulties which surround 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 109 

experimentation on this subject, the more certain are his experiments to give a 
negative result ; while positive results are no less sure to crown the efforts of the 
clumsy and the careless. 

And again, 

The fact is, that at the present moment there is not a shadow of trustworthy 
direct evidence that abiogenesis does take place, or has taken place, within the 
period during which the existence of life on the globe is recorded. * 

Professor Tyndall says : 

True men of science will frankly admit their inability to point to any satisfactory 
experimental proof that life can be developed, save from demonstrable antecedent 
life, t 

In another place he says : 

I here affirm, that no shred of trustworthy experimental testimony exists to 
prove that life in our day has ever appeared independently of antecedent life. \ 

And once more he declares 

that every attempt made in our day to generate life independently of antecedent 
life has utterly broken down. § 

After long and minute experimentation in reference to spon- 
taneous generation Pasteur gives this as his assured conclusion : 

There is no case known at the present day in which we can affirm that micro- 
scopic creatures have come into existence without germs, without parents like 
themselves. Those who pretend that they do have been the dupes of illusions, of 
experiments badly performed, vitiated by mistakes which they have not been able 
to perceive, or which they have not known how to avoid. J 

Professor Virchow, of Berlin, says : 

This generatio cequivoca [by which he means spontaneous generation] which 
has been so often contested and so often contradicted, is, nevertheless, always 
meeting us afresh. To be sure, we know not a single positive fact to prove that a 
generatio cequivoca has ever been made, that inorganic masses, such as the firm 
of Carbon & Co., have ever spontaneously developed themselves into organic 
masses. No one has ever seen a generatio cequivoca effected ; and whoever sup- 
poses that it has occurred is contradicted by the naturalist, and not merely by the 
theologian. . . . We must acknowledge that it has not yet been proved. IT 

* Encyclopedia Britannica ; article on Biology, 
t Fragments of Science, Vol. II.. p. 194, Belfast Address. 
% Nineteenth Century, March, 1878, p. 507. 
§ Fragments 0/ Science, preface to the sixth edition, p. vi. 

\ Revue des Cours scientifique, 23 Avril, 1864, p. 265 ; article " Des Generations spontanees/* 
. H The Freedom 0/ Science in the Modem State, p. 36 (2d Ed.). 



HO CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

Professor Elliott Coues {Biogen, p. 39) says: 

If life inhered in matter as the necessary result of any particular composition of 
matter death would follow decomposition and be otherwise impossible ; but, in 
fact, the reverse is the actual sequence of events. 

That is to say, death ordinarily precedes decomposition, thus 
showing that life does not depend upon matter any more than the 
existence of matter depends upon the presence of life. But if life 
do not inhere in matter then the evolution theory cannot be main- 
tained. There is a " break " and a " gap." Any one " break," any- 
where, any one 4< gap," however small, is fatal to the evolution 
hypothesis. 

The late Robert Patterson, in his very able book on the Errors 
of Evolution, says : 

There is no force in nature able to inspire life. On the contrary, all the forces of 
nature are antagonistic to life, and the struggle for existence, which Mr. Darwin 
so eloquently describes, is the struggle of life against the powers of nature. Every 
drop of water conveyed by a plant from the ground to the top of the leaf, every 
step or motion made by any animal, is a struggle against the force of gravitation. 
The laws of chemical affinity, appealed to as the great forces in evolving life, 
operate in exactly the contrary direction ; they cause death and decomposition 
when life ceases its resistance. The gastric juice will eat its way through the 
stomach which secreted it when that stomach has ceased from the struggle of life. 
The very familiar illustration of the difficulty of preserving dead vegetables and 
meats attests the destructive power of the forces of matter if not counteracted by 
some superior intelligence. Mr. Spencer pompously announces the heat of the sun 
as the sufficient force originating all life. But the sun might shine on his solutions 
of smelling salts to all eternity without producing the smallest fungus, unless the 
seeds were previously there. The forces of inorganic matter can destroy, but 
cannot possibly impart or originate, life." — Errors of Evolution, p. 193. 



XVII.—IS EVOLUTION SCIENTIFIC? 

The most trustworthy science, then, shows us that the theory of 
evolution has to disprove what has been accepted as proved in 
other departments before it can make itself acceptable. In other 
words, a great objection to evolution is that it is unscientific, on the 
authority of some of the most trustworthy scientists. 

Let us push aside any difficulty for want of time and assume 
room in duration large enough for any thing; shall we then be rid 
of all difficulty? Let us see. Evolution is supposed to have 
aid from Mr. Darwin's theory of the origin of species. But it is 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. m 

not a theory; it is merely an hypothesis. "Suppose things were 
thus, then species must have originated thus." With extraordinary 
industry and skill Mr. Darwin gathered and stated a vast number 
of what he believed to be facts; and if they all be admitted they 
show that only by the constant superintendence of human intellect 
over the application of human industry is it possible to make great 
varieties of pigeons ; but (i) the very moment the human super- 
intendence is withdrawn the pigeons begin to go back to the origi- 
nal, natural type, domestication never having been able to produce 
forms of animals that are self-perpetuating ; and (2) no skill of 
domestication and differentiating ever has made any species pass 
into another species ; for instance, any line of doves produce the 
first eagle. 

If the changes in the universe are going forward on the plan of 
evolution there must be an advance from the poorer to the better, 
from the lower to the higher. But the facts are against this. The 
planet shows that multitudes of species have degenerated. Even 
man has degenerated. Is not the first of every thing, as a rule, 
better than most that follows? The phrase "the survival of the 
fittest" has no scientific support. It is a grim satire on nature, 
unless evolution teach that the worst is the fittest. When the wheat 
and the tares are sown in the field we know which chokes the 
other. Now, if there be no stays or stops, every thing must reach 
the bottom to which it tends, and evolution provides for no such 
pause and upward turning caused by the incoming of some force 
from without. Indeed, whatever proof of improvement and upward 
movement can be produced is a proof which stands adverse to the 
evolution hypothesis, because it shows the incoming of something 
from outside of nature. Such a simple fact as that no grain which 
now forms food for men, such as corn or wheat, has ever been found 
in a wild state, but is all the product of cultivation, which means 
the coming in of a force ab extra, and that such grain would dis- 
appear if the culture were withdrawn for a short time, stands against 
the hypothesis of evolution. 

That we may see how unscientific that hypothesis is, consider 
that that only is science which is known and capable of proof. 
Guesses, prophecies, assumptions, count for nothing in this court. 



112 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

Now go back to the definition given in the beginning of this 
treatise. Mr. Spencer starts out with the assumption of " a limited 
mass of homogeneous matter." The grossness of this assumption will 
be apparent when you reflect that up to A. D. 1885 there has not 
been discovered any homogeneous matter in the universe. 

If there be such a thing as homogeneous matter must it not be 
protoplasm, which is assumed to be the material basis of life? Pro- 
toplasm has been carefully examined microscopically by our ablest 
scientific men, and this is the result. Professor Huxley says that 
all the forms of protoplasm which have yet been examined contain 
the four elements — carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen — in very 
complex union.* In whatever form it appears, " whether fungus or 
oak, worm or man," its elements are the same; and when life in it 
becomes extinct it " is resolved into its mineral and lifeless con- 
stituents." f It is admitted, of course, that carbon, hydrogen, oxy- 
gen, and nitrogen are lifeless bodies, and that they all exist previous 
to their union ; " but when they are brought together," says Pro- 
fessor Huxley, " under certain conditions, they give rise to the still 
more complex body, protoplasm ; and this protoplasm exhibits the 
phenomena of life." % 

It is a mere dream. If you can find a substantial phenix, or 
griffin, or chimera, you may find homogeneous matter. We are told 
that it is not on this planet, nor anywhere in the solar system, so 
far as man has been able to discover. Nay, while all along we have 
been supposing that there might be at least a hatful of it some- 
where in the universe, the spectroscope has torn the bottom from 
Mr. Spencer's definition and spilled all the sense it seemed to have. 
He must first show, what no man yet has been able to do, that 
there either is, or has been, homogeneous matter, or surrender his 
definition of evolution. When the chief apostle of his religion can- 
not define its fundamental doctrine we must decide that he at least 
cannot prove its truth. 

When you examine Mr. Huxley's definition you must consign it 
to the same fate. He assumes what has not been proved, the primi- 
tive nebulosity of the universe. He assumes, what has not been proved, 

* Lay Sermons, p. 130 \ Ibid., p. 131. \Ibid., p. 135. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. H 3 

that the molecules of that original nebulosity possessed forces. 
He further assumes, what has 7iot been proved, that there was mu- 
tual interaction between those forces. And he further assumes, 
what has not been proved, that that interaction was according to 
definite laws. 

The hypothesis of the " primitive nebulosity of the universe," as 
Professor Huxley calls it, rests upon the assumption of the gradual 
cooling of the sun and of all the planets. 

The Nebular Hypothesis is briefly this : That the space now occupied by the 
solar system was originally filled by an evenly-diffused mass of nebulous matter, 
which received a rotary motion. Under the attraction of its parts condensation 
goes on, accelerating the rotation. Under mechanical laws rings are formed, be- 
coming spheres, and thus the planets and their satellites, moving in the same 
plane and at proportionate distances, come into being, the central mass, as it con- 
tracts, giving off light and heat, and remaining the controlling center. — Rev. Dr. 
Drury, Vedder Lectures, 1883. 

Plainly, to be sure of any increase or decrease of the temperature 
of a body we must know its present heat-state, and also its former 
heat-state. We do not know any thing of the former. In terms 
of the thermometer it has been variously given from 1,561° to 
5,344,840° Fahrenheit, the former by Pouillet, the latter by Secchi, 
two famous scientists. Consider the immense difference. It is as if 
two nautical observers should give the place of the ship, one at the 
South Pole, and the other at the equator. Who has ever shown us 
any method of arriving with accuracy at the heat of the sun ? And 
yet we must know that or else we cannot say that the sun is cool- 
ing. Men adopt a theory which cannot stand without a certain 
assumption, and then they make that assumption, although there is 
not a particle of knowledge to sustain it : and they call that 
science ! 

Here, then, we rest the case, without having exhausted the evi- 
dence. We do not deny the truth of the hypothesis of evolution 
and have not attempted to prove it false. But we insist that those 
who bring it forward are bound to prove it true, and they are very 
far from having done so. Nor do we deny the hypothesis that 
the moon is a green cheese, nor shall we try to prove it false. 
But when those who affirm that it is true bring no more proof 
for its truth than the materialistic scientists produce for evolu- 



ii4 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



tion we shall not admire our green-cheese friends when they 
sneer at men of brains who simply demand satisfactory, rational, 
scientific proof. 

Whether the theory of evolution be true or false it is apparent 
that at this stage of the discussion, after a century of hard work 
to sustain it, the only verdict that can be given, a verdict of the 
truth of which even evolutionists must feel sensible, is the Scotch 
verdict of Not Proven. 

PART II. 
I.— BUDDHA, JESUS. AND EVOLUTION. 

BECAUSE I did not desire to discuss any topic that bore even 
the semblance of close alliance with the religious sentiment I did 
not take up the existence of Jesus in human history — a fact that 
must be just as much considered in forming a cosmic theory as 
any other fact. If it had been introduced it would have followed 
the section on " Genius." 

While the greatest geniuses are rare, so that one might say 
that there have been not more than a score who have so touched 
the highest water-mark of power as to leave there the traces 
which all succeeding generations should read as theirs, there 
have been those twenty, and evolution has no place for their 
existence. Genius has never been evolved. 

But beyond the highest of these there is a phenomenon in 
humanity which any theory of the universe must account for before 
it can be accepted. It is the appearance, in the human race, of 
Jesus of Nazareth, a person who was not a genius. Now, this is 
not a question of theology or religion in this discussion. From 
his name let all such thoughts be separated. But a cosmic theory 
must have room for every phenomenal thing and person, and science 
must provide a place for Jesus as for Laura Bridgman. Just as he 
holds his position and posture in history as a man, he must be 
accounted for as much as Napoleon, or Luther, in regard to whom, 
as in regard to him, there is a great diversity of opinion. 

How did he come? If the theory of evolution be true our 
humanity must have been differentiating itself so that at last it 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. n$ 

naturally produced him such as he was. This brings a number of 
questions which must be satisfactorily answered before evolution 
can be accepted. 

1. Why was not Jesus naturally produced earlier? If it be 
answered that humanity had not previously reached the proper 
stage of development then it must be explained how that was the 
fitting time which marked the most degraded and rotten stage of 
humanity ; when man had been for ages, according to fact and con- 
trary to evolution, growing morally worse, until he had reached a 
point at which he was so bad that he had never been so bad before, 
and never has been since. And it must be explained how, when 
there was not a single great man known upon the planet, and after 
there had been such men as Caesar and x\lexander, Socrates and 
Plato, there appeared as the product of humanity the person 
acknowledged by many millions of men to have been, taken all in 
all, the greatest man that ever lived. Where were the preparatory 
''studies" for this great production? What ancestry had he? 
Who among them exhibited "the promise and potency" for the 
production of him ? 

2. Why has not a second Jesus been produced? Humanity has 
not lost any capacity of evolving. It has had eighteen more cent- 
uries, in which it has grown much better than it was at the coming 
of Jesus, by causes which were manifestly set in operation by him, 
the withdrawal of which, so far as we can scientifically calculate, 
would drop the world back to the low level at which his advent 
found it. Have not men a right to demand that humanity shall 
exhibit to-day a man as superior to Jesus as Jesus was to the 
noblest specimen of manhood extant eighteen centuries before His 
time ? Where is there a man who can be compared to him with- 
out a shock not only to the moral sense but the scientific intelli- 
gence of mankind ? 

But these two questions must be satisfactorily answered before 
evolution can account for the existence of the most phenomenal 
specimen of humanity. And the most phenomenal man comes 
as much into the argument as any other phenomenal animal. 

If, however, because of religious prejudice, or for any other 
reason, good or bad, it be denied that Jesus was an incomparable 



Il6 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

man, then it may be demanded to have named the man who may 
be compared to him. Is Buddha named ? Then he was inferior to 
Jesus, or his equal, or his superior. If his inferior, or equal, the 
citation of his name is impertinent to the argument. Granting 
there was such a personage as Buddha, and that he had a defined 
history like Jesus of Nazareth, or Caesar of Rome, if it can be 
shown that Buddha or Sakyamuni was superior to Jesus the argu- 
ment is greatly strengthened. His history antedates that of Jesus 
by several centuries, and yet Jesus, it is claimed, is the inferior. 
Moreover, there are two men, having no connection on the line of 
heredity, who rule more millions of men this day than any other 
two men that have ever lived ; and, according to the assumption, 
the later is the inferior of the earlier ; and during the twenty-three 
centuries which have elapsed since the first appeared there has 
been no one who has approximated his altitude among all the sons 
of men. A theory which can take no account of such phenomena 
in human history as Buddha and Jesus may be true, but it cannot 
be accepted as proved. That is the case with evolution. 

II.— NATURAL SELECTION. 

" Natural Selection !" How often we find these two words 
spelled with capital initials, as if they constituted a proper name ; a 
significant proper name! Now, who is this Natural Selection? 
Who ? You cannot ask what. It is not a thing. It is a person, if 
the name be significant. There is never selection without mind, 
and mind cannot be conceived apart from personality. For in- 
stance, if one should say " the creation of man began the moment 
when psychical variations became of so much more use to our 
ancestors than physical variations that they were seized and en- 
hanced by natural selection to the comparative neglect of the 
latter," we should feel that he was talking nonsense, if he did not 
mean that our ancestors had exerted their intellect in making the 
comparison necessary for choice, and after that had exerted their 
will in seizing and holding those traits. If he meant that in matter 
the power to choose resides we should regard him as confounding 
mind and matter in such a way as to render his utterances unworthy 
of attention, that his statement was a guess, without a single soli- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. no- 

tary fact in nature to sustain it, and much that looks quite in the 
opposite direction. " Natural Selection " is a phrase made of two 
words, which, in the senses ordinarily assigned them, are mutually 
exclusive. And yet in this enlightened age there are people who 
worship what Mr. John Fiske calls 

a blind process known as Natural Selection, the deity that slumbers not nor sleeps 
(Desliuy of Man, p. 23; . 

III.— A WEAK POINT. 

A weak point in the Darwin theory of the evolution of higher 
forms of life from lower ones, by natural selection and the survival 
of the fittest, was brought to the notice of the editor of the Christian 
Intelligencer by an intelligent gentleman. He said that according to 
the Darwinian doctrine man is the highest product of evolution, and, 
therefore, ought to exhibit natural selection in its highest and best 
exercise, and in him the survival of the fittest should have its 
supreme illustration. On the contrary, we find, as a rule, that men 
and women mate unwisely, select unhealthy, physically inferior, 
partners, and by their selections keep alive and transmit to de- 
scendants physical infirmities and diseases. Tall men marry short 
women, men of vigorous health marry women who are weaklings, 
intellectual men select unintellectual wives, and so on. Nothing is 
more common. Yet in the persons of those who are the very 
culmination of evolution there should be found the perfection of 
natural selection. How exceedingly rare such a selection is among 
men. And as to the survival of the fittest, it may be urged that 
the very opposite has been embodied in the proverb, found among all 
nations, that " whom the gods love die young." Constantly, worth- 
less, useless people live long. Of the majority of old men and 
women, known to be composed of very worthy people, it may be 
said they are not especially more fit to survive than were those of 
their generation who died in youth or middle age. What, then, is a 
theory good for which does not find in the creatures who are its 
climax an eminent illustration of its correctness, or the highest and 
most convincing proof of its accuracy? According to Darwinism, 
man ought to exhibit natural selection and the survival of the fittest 
in their perfection. Every body knows he does not. 



n8 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

IV.— IMPORTANT UTTERANCES. 

ARGYLL. — The Duke of Argyll, in Primeval Man, p. 75, quotes 
the following opinion of Darwinism, held by Professor John Phillips 
(in Life : the Origin and Succession) : 

Every-where we are required by the hypothesis to look somewhere else ; which 
may fairly be interpreted to signify that the hypothesis every-where fails in the first 
and most important step. How is it conceivable that the second stage should be 
every-where preserved, but the first nowhere ? 

Sir William Dawson, F.R.S., F.G.S., the Principal of McGill 

University, Montreal, speaks, in the seventh edition (1882) of the 

Story of the Earth and Man, of the evolutionist doctrine as 

the strangest doctrine of humanity, and supported by vague analogies and figures 
of speech which indicate that the accumulated facts of our age have gone altogether 
beyond its capacity for generalization. 

Rev. Dr. Drury : 

Evolution, regarded as descriptive of a process in nature, has much, we thus 
see, to commend it, but it ought to be distinctly remembered and emphasized that 
it is as yet a mere theory, and must not be regarded as having more than an 
hypothetical value. In whatever form it be held, whether that behind which in- 
fidels and agnostics hide and defend their unwillingness to believe, or that 
which many Christians hold in conjunction with their faith in God and the Bible, 
it must not be lost sight of that it is yet unproven, and may not properly be used 
for any other purpose, or in any other way, than is legitimate for an hypothesis. 
— Drury 's Truths and Untruths of Evolution, p. 21. 

Dr. Elam. — In a series of articles on Evolution, in the Con- 
temporary Reviezv, Vol. XXIX., the Doctor says : 

On a general survey of the theory of Darwin nothing strikes us more forcibly 
than the total absence of direct evidence of any one of the steps. There is an 
abundance of semi-acute reasoning upon what might have occurred under condi- 
tions which seem never to have been fulfilled. 

Bishop Ellicott. — This learned man, who is the editor of The 

Handy Commentary, expresses himself in plain terms on the present 

status of the doctrine of evolution. In his introduction to the 

Book of Genesis, he says : 

Evolution is very far from having attained to the rank of scientific verity ; it is 
at most an interesting and ingenious theory. Unfortunately for its temperate dis- 
cussion, evolution is now enwrapped by many of its partisans in the ugly pellicle of 
materialism, and for this there is in the Bible no place. While, therefore, I am 
content to leave all the processes of creation to those who make the material 
universe the object of their intelligent study, I object to their crossing beyond 
their proper limits, which they do in arguing that our enlarged knowledge of 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. ug 

matter and its laws militates with a belief in a governing and law-giving mind ; 
for material science can penetrate no further than to the phenomena of nature. 
It is the noble teaching of the book of Genesis that creation was the work of an 
All-wise and Almighty intelligence, and that the Infinite Mind even called matter 
into being, and gave it those laws which scientific men study so wisely. I am 
content to believe every thing which they prove in their own domain ; but when 
they make assumptions in regions where they are but trespassers it is mere waste 
of time to dispute with them. I cannot say this without at the same time acknowl- 
edging the immense obligation under which theologians lie to the masters of the 
sciences of astronomy and geology ; for they have enlarged our ideas, brushed 
away many a crude popular fallacy, and enabled us to understand more and 
more of the perfect ways of God. 

GUYOT : 

Any length of time that Darwin might desire for his transformations would 
never suffice to make of the monkey a civilizable man. — Creation, p. 126. 

HiECKEL. — Dr. Haeckel, the greatest living exponent of evolution, 
said to a company of naturalists, in 1877, that 

the two principles of inheritance and adaptation explain the development of the 
manifold existing organisms, from a single organic cell ; dispensing forever with 
the need of a Creator, and moreover, a creature composed of only one of these 
omnipotent cells is shown by certain zoological inquiries to be possessed of motion, 
sensibility, perception, and will. — Quoted by Professor J. B. Ewing in the Tokio 
Course of Lectures, p. 101. 

Huxley : 

It is not absolutely proven that a group of animals having all the characters ex- 
hibited by species in nature has ever been originated by selection, whether artifi- 
cial or natural. — Lay Sermons, p. 226. 

St. Geore Mivart. — This able scientist says, in regard to Dar- 
win's doctrine of Natural Selection : 

I cannot hesitate to call it a puerile hypothesis. 

Theodore T. Munger, D.D. — This popular writer speaks of 

evolution as 

a finite system, a merely phenomenal section of the universe and of time, with no 
whe7ice, nor whither, nor why, a system which simply supplies man with a certain 
kind of knowledge, but solves no problem that weighs on his heart, answers no 
question that he much cares to ask, and throws not one glimmer of additional 
light on his origin, his nature, or his destiny. — Freedom of Faith, p. 26. 

Professor Piper : 

The French Academy, it seems, refused to acknowledge Darwin as a scientific 
man at all, declining to admit him a member of that body, on the ground that his 
so-called science was no science, and that it was made up for the most part of 



120 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

mere assumptions; and Dawson says, in his book entitled The Earth and Man, 
p. 330 : " Let any one take up either of Darwin's great books, or Spencer's Biology, 
and merely ask himself, as he reads each paragraph, ' What is assumed here, and 
what is proved?' and he will find the whole fabric melt away like a vision." 
Further he says : " The theory of the struggle for existence and survival of the 
fittest, as applied to man, though the most popular phrase of evolutionism at 
present, is nothing less than the basest and most horrible of superstitions. It makes 
man not merely carnal but devilish. It takes his lowest appetites and propensities, 
and makes them his God and creator." — Mind and Nature, firne, 1885. 

QUATREFAGES. — In his Natural History of Man (p. 70): 

While recognizing the convenience of Darwin's theory in the interpretation of a 
great number of facts he is obliged to reject it because it is irreconcilable with 
other facts but chiefly because in disaccord with physiological laws, such as the 
sterility of hybrids. 

Sir Wyville Thompson.— In Challenger Reports, Vol. L, this 
scientist declares that recent investigations of the abyssal fauna of 
the ocean by the ship Challenger 
refuse to give the least support to Darwinism. 

Tyndall. — Professor Tyndall says : 

Those who hold the doctrine of evolution are by no means ignorant of the un- 
certainty of their data, and they only yield to it a provisional assent.— Scientific 
Use of the Imagination, p. 469. 

Van Benedin. — Professor Van Benedin, of the University of 

Louvain, quoting Oswald Heer, in Le Monde Primitive, says : 

The more we advance in the study of nature the more profound is our convic- 
tion that belief in an Almighty Creator . . . can alone resolve the enigmas 
of nature, as well as those of human life. 

VlRCHOW : 

As a matter of fact, we must positively recognize that there exists as yet a 
sharp line of demarkation between man and the ape. We cannot teach, we cannot 
pronounce it to be a conquest of science, that man descends from the ape or from 
any other animal, — Quoted By Joseph Cook, in Monday Lecture of April 15, 1878. 

VON BlSCHOFF. — This scientist is a specialist in comparative 
anatomy. He tells us that as he pursues his investigations in the 
comparison of man and the so-called anthropoid apes 
the difference between men and apes becomes great and fundamental. 

WlNCHELL. — Professor Winchell says (The Doctrine of Evolu- 
tion, p. 54) : 

The great stubborn fact which every form of the theory [natural selection] en- 
counters at the very outset is that, notwithstanding variations, we are ignorant of 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. I2 i 

a single instance of the derivation of one good species from another. The world 
has been ransacked for an example, and occasionally it has seemed for a time as 
if an instance had been found of the origination of a genuine species by so-called 
natural agencies ; but we only give utterance to the admissions of all the recent 
advocates of derivative theories when we announce that the long-sought exfieri- 
me?itum cruets has not been discovered. 

V.— A VOICE FROM THE BRITISH MUSEUM. 

Professor George E. Post, M.D., of the Syrian Mission, is a 

gentleman of superior scientific attainments. He visited the British 

Museum and met Mr. Etheridge, who is in charge of a department, 

and is acknowledged to be one of the foremost of British experts in 

his specialty. This gentleman gave his opinion on evolution. The 

following letter, sent to the Evangelist by a former colleague of Dr. 

Post, describes the interview : 

London, August 2, 1885. 
Yesterday I was in the Natural History Department of the British Museum. I 
had business touching some fossils which I found in the Latakia Miocene and 
Pliocene clay-beds, and about which I wrote an article that appeared in Nature 
last year. Mr. Etheridge, F.R.S., kindly examined and named them. I was anx- 
ious to hear what a first-rate working scientist, with perhaps the largest opportunity 
for induction in the world, would say on Darwinian evolution. So, after he had 
shown me all the wonders of the establishment, I asked him whether, after all, this 
was not the working out of mind and Providence. He turned to me, with a clear, 
honest look into my eyes, and replied: "In all this great museum there is not a 
'particle of evidence of transmutation. Nine-tenths of the talk of evolutionists is 
sheer nonsense, not founded on observation, and wholly unsupported by fact. 
Men adopt a theory and then strain their facts to support it. I read all their 
books, but they make no impression on my belief in the stability of species. 
Moreover, the talk of the great antiquity of man is of the same value. There is 
no such thing as a fossil man. Men are ready to regard you as a fool if you do 
not go with them in all their vagaries. But this museum is full of proofs of the 

UTTER FALSITY OF THEIR VIEWS." 



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CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 

[In 1881 (July 21) the American Institute of Christian Philosophy was organized 
at Greenwood Lake, N. J. It has since grown to an association of nearly 500 
members. Its objects cannot be stated better than in its latest circular, which I 
here quote : 

"This Institute exists for the purpose of cultivating the study of the relations 
between science and religion, but mainly to produce and to circulate literature of a 
high order which shall antagonize the teachings of agnosticism, materialism, and 
every other form of false philosophy. 

" The need of such resistance to insidious as well as to open infidelity is clear to 
every person acquainted with current modern literature and with the subtle in- 
fluences which poison the minds of the young in our schools and colleges. 

"To promote its objects the Institute has meetings every month during the 
winter, and also summer schools, at both of which papers and lectures by able 
writers are presented and afterward published in its periodical organ, Christian 
Thought, and sometimes separately. To do this money is required. That money 
comes from membership fees and donations. 

" It is desirable to interest Christian men and women, learned and unlearned, all 
over the land, in the production, the circulation, and the reading of a literature 
which shall promote intellectual with religious culture. 

" It is not at all necessary that one shall be able to attend the meetings ; that is 
a small thing ; all the papers are printed and sent free to the members. The 
names and fees of ten thousand Christians, sent us in one year, would help us to 
push the battle to the gates. Each member should urge his friends to become 
members of the Institute as they would become members of the American Bible 
Society, that they may help to distribute a saving literature which they cannot 
produce. This will answer the two objections sometimes offered ; namely, that 
(1) the person solicited lives too far from the seat of the Society to attend the 
meetings, and (2) that he is not able to contribute any thing to its work. Let 
every Christian be urged to contribute (1) his name and (2) his fee. The Institute 
will take care of the rest. 

"There is no initiation fee. The annual subscription for members is five dollars. 
One hundred dollars will constitute a life member if contributed to the Endowment 
Fund, and fifty dollars, if given to the General Fund." 

As its first President I delivered several anniversary addresses which are here 
reproduced from Christian Thought, the organ of the Institute.] 



FIRST ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS. 

[Delivered before the American Institute of Christian Philosophy, at its Summer School, 21st of July, 1882.] 

It has been thought advisable to hold an anniversary meeting at 
the end of the first year of the existence of the American Institute 
of Christian Philosophy. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. j 2 ^ 

The first year of the life of a child or an institution is not usually 
crowded with incidents that are startling, or even attractive ; but 
that first year, for either child or institution, is not the least impor- 
tant of its existence. It can do little to instruct the world or 
change the course or character of human events ; but it is usually 
crowded with the perils of teething, and other infantile difficulties, 
the surmounting of which gives some increased assurance of the 
continuance of the life of the child or the institution. 

As we have passed our first year we may find it useful to make a 
review of its history in face of the natural and rational challenge of 
the world, or of so much of the great world as cares any thing for 
us, of our raison d'etre. 

We commenced by setting before us seven objects, some of which 
we had in common with other organizations older than this Insti- 
tute. But we were compelled to share them by generic necessity. 
Ours was a case where a certain genus seemed necessary for our 
particular differentia. There are other societies which concern them- 
selves in the investigation of the most important questions of phi- 
losophy. There are others which engage themselves with the most 
important questions of science. Now we propose to do both, and 
to do so fully and impartially. We desire the gentlemen who pre- 
pare lectures for our courses and papers for our meetings to know 
that an examination of any scientific or philosophical question will 
be acceptable to us even if the discussion have no apparent bearing 
on questions theological or ethical. We believe that true religion 
must foster all honest investigation made on scientific principles. 
We cannot know too many things nor know any thing too well. 
As all accurate gathering of the real facts of the universe enriches 
religion, so all true scientific treatment strengthens religion. It may 
be years, it may be generations, before some well-ascertained fact 
can make good its relation to another ascertained fact — indeed, the 
ascertainments may lie ages apart ; but philosophy, the science of 
sciences, will by and by settle the relation and thus enhance the 
value of both facts. Indeed, the function of philosophy is that of a 
wise architect and master builder who knows how to work into his 
design and his structure every block of stone, however shaped. An 
honest, enthusiastic student of nature, smit with a love of worms, 



124 



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may devote his life to the investigation of the habits of his pet rep- 
tiles without dream or suspicion that he is gathering in store, for 
some one who is to follow, much that is to confirm or modify the 
existing conceptions of ethics and the prevailing system of theology. 
We wish it therefore to be understood that we shall give warm and 
cordial reception to those who come to us with the results of any 
investigation of any important question, in any department of sci- 
ence or philosophy. 

While this is one of our objects it would not be a sufficient 
reason for our existence if we had nothing beyond. Other institu- 
tions, with a zeal and ability which excite our admiration, and, we 
trust, will kindle our emulation, are doing that work and doing it 
well. But we set before us, as our distinctive work, which no other 
society claims, to give special attention to those questions of science 
and philosophy which bear upon the great truths revealed in Holy 
Scripture. 

It was very plainly seen that exceptions might be taken to this 
portion of the map we drew of the territory we meant to occupy. 
We foresaw that men would arise to say that thus we narrowed our 
field and took for granted that which was to be proved. And in 
point of fact they have done so in this initial year of our existence. 
We are not without our response. We may say, in the first place, 
that no institution can do every thing; that we shall not exclude — 
nay, shall gladly welcome — every honest contribution to science and 
philosophy in any of its departments ; but that as an institution we 
do consider some questions very much more important than others, 
and that while, as far as we can, we shall aid all institutions which 
are studying other questions, we shall give our main strength to 
those which are most important in our estimation. 

Each man must judge for himself the relative importance of any 
pursuit. As the times are, as the current of civilization is at present 
running, we think that sanitary questions are important, and there- 
fore we invited so competent a person as Mr. C. F. Wingate to give 
us the lecture which he entitled " Cleanliness and Godliness." We 
believe that the relation of literature to the people is a very impor- 
tant question, and have solicited the discussion thereof by so com- 
petent a writer as Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie. We believe that a 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 1 25 

knowledge of the other orbs in our system is valuable ; that it is 
highly important that scholars know all that can be known of the 
heavenly bodies and the laws by which they are regulated, and that 
all men should have a general knowledge of astronomy, and there- 
fore have brought our learned Professor Young from his height of 
observation at Princeton to instruct, not only scholars learned in 
other departments, but also the young men and maidens at our 
Summer School who have come " to have a good time," and to 
whom we desire to give a better, so that those who come to flirt may 
stay to learn. 

These portions of this year's Syllabus will show that we sympa- 
thize with all study of all truth in all departments. But we say, in 
the second place, that these hearty welcomes to all intellectual 
workers are not to be interpreted into the supposition that we lose 
sight of the relative importance of different studies and intellectual 
productions. These are important, but not in our eyes so important 
as a study of the truths which lie below and support all fruitful 
labor in physical fields. 

If it be alleged that we take for granted certain things, we frankly 
admit the allegation, but deny that that is an objection. Our first 
postulate is that there are such things as truths in the universe. 
Of course we did not undertake to prove that proposition in our 
prospectus. In this, our first assumption, we addressed ourselves to 
what we believe to be myriads of our fellow-men who believe in the 
existence of truths. If any man hold no such belief he will not be 
expected to take interest in our work. Then we assume that there 
are some truths which are revealed to men — that is, capable of 
being learned by the human mind when it is taught. If there be 
men who believe that there is such a thing as a truth, but that both 
its existence and its significance are unknowable, that class of strange 
thinkers will perhaps take no interest in our work nor in the work 
of any society for scientific and philosophical pursuits. 

For, any body of men banded together to cultivate science as- 
sumes that there are such things as truths, and that these truths are 
where they can be found by the search, and can be perceived by the 
intelligence, and can be formulated by the logical understanding 
of men. So that in our second assumption we address multi- 



126 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

tudes of our fellow-men, of all lands and all religions and of no 
religion. 

Our third assumption was, that as in nature so in Holy Scripture 
there is a revelation of great truths. In our prospectus we did not 
stop to demonstrate that. We knew that we believed that proposi- 
tion, and we knew that there were millions who believed it, and 
that among those millions were men of the very highest intellectual 
abilities and attainments as well as men of the humblest mental 
endowments, men of elegant leisure as well as men pressed with 
the burdens of business. Of course the men who do not believe 
this will not only not become members of our Institute, but will 
not find themselves able to take any interest in our work. But 
there are so many who are of this way of thinking that if one 
tenth of them were enrolled in our Society it would be the most 
numerous institution on the face of the earth. 

There is — and it must not be supposed that we fail to see it — a 
fourth assumption ; namely, that the truths revealed in the New 
Testament and those revealed in the Old Testament and those 
revealed in the Older Testament all form a harmonious whole. 
There are those who do not believe this ; those who believe that all 
the truth in the universe lies in the physical world of which we 
have cognizance by our senses ; those who regard any pretension to 
revelation in the Christian Scriptures as contemptible, and those 
who seem to regard with hatred what are claimed to be " great 
truths in Holy Scripture." We can expect nothing from these 
except an opposition which we cannot deprecate because we invite 
it. But there are millions who believe the propositions embedded 
in our fourth assumption ; and we seek to organize from among 
those millions a company of some hundreds of workers who shall 
diligently set themselves to the task of exhibiting that existent 
harmony, so that whoso takes the Bible for a text will find nature a 
most instructive commentator, and whoso takes nature for the text 
shall find the most luminous help in the Holy Scripture. 

Now the very fact of our being Christians necessitates intellect- 
ually the belief contained in our fourth assumption, just as the 
belief in the supernatural necessitates the belief in the natural. 
To believe that in these sacred books, which are our rule of faith 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 1 27 

and practice, there are truths which oppose or are opposed by 
other truths, such truths as are revealed in nature, would be to believe 
that either there is no God or that there are at least two ; but the 
fundamental proposition of the Christian religion is that there is a 
God and that there can be but one God. We believe that no one 
but God could have created the universe we see about us, and the 
Bible which we see before us, and the moral nature we feel within 
us. They must all, therefore, have but one author ; and the author 
who could create them must be omniscient, and therefore never 
either self-contradicted or confused either in thought or action. 

To what has been said may be added a few words extracted from 
an article by Professor Francis L. Patton, on the " American Insti- 
tute of Christian Philosophy," in the Presbyterian Review for July, 
1882. This acute thinker says: " Some may be supposed to object 
to the quasi-sectarianism of the term Christian philosophy. But 
this criticism ought not to be pressed. For while we may go too 
far in conditioning Christianity by an antecedent philosophy it is 
useless to deny that there is a philosophy which is anti-Christian ; 
and in these days of hostility to revealed truth no apology should 
be needed for those who are drawn into active co-operation by their 
common faith in Christianity and their common love for philosophy." 
In prosecuting our work we may produce several results. We 
may modify our own manner of stating the great truths revealed in 
Holy Scripture, and perhaps our very conception of them. We 
trust we shall not be unwilling to do that. There would be no use 
of investigation, research, comparison, and banded co-operation if 
all the truths of the Bible were now known in all the ways in which 
they can possibly be known. As the bearing of any truth of nature 
upon a truth of the Bible will in a large measure depend upon the 
thoroughness of the investigation of both truths, and as successive 
generations of thinkers work with the advantage of the use of what 
was done by their predecessors, we must expect that the study of 
any science will advance the study of every science. Theology is a 
science just as geology is a science. The Bible and nature are facts 
of God; theology and geology are facts of man. Just as there are 
schools in physical science there will be schools in theology. Such 
an institute as ours must be catholic. We must welcome theolo- 



128 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

gians of different and even opposite schools ; and whether the study 
of scientific questions shall bring them more closely together or 
widen their separation, still we must go on in honest study of all 
questions that belong to science and philosophy. 

We may also modify the views of scientific men who are not 
Christians. They may come to see that being a Christian no more 
renders one a fool than being a scientist makes one a rascal. While 
they stand and challenge Christian scholars to defend their claims 
Christian scholars will stand and challenge them to make good their 
assertions. Candid theologians admit that very much more has been 
assumed in theology than has been made good, and candid students 
of physical science admit the same in their department. It is ear- 
nestly hoped by some of us that one good effect of our labors will 
be to cause men to hold only as hypothesis that which is hypothesis 
until it can be every-where accepted as a conclusion. One of the 
greatest obstructions to the progress both of science and religion is 
the unscientific and irreligious assumption of hypothesis as con- 
clusion. To-day the apparent contradictions between hypotheses in 
physical astronomy and hypotheses in geology are as great as are 
the apparent contradictions between hypotheses in geology and 
hypotheses in theology. There are some few things agreed upon by 
all parties. We trust that the labors of this Institute will enlarge 
the boundaries of the common property and enhance the wealth of 
the whole company of mankind. 

We do not feel our call to cultivate science and philosophy in all 
their departments so loud as our call to study the relations of one 
science to another, of all science to philosophy, and of the philosophy 
of all science to religion. 

Science has a fascination for so many minds that great is the 
company of those who are prosecuting scientific research in some 
manner. There is no special need of a new society to foster this 
work. But fewer persons are striving to get rid of the contradictions 
and conflicting hypotheses of men who are called scientists ; and 
still fewer are engaged in examining and discussing all supposed or 
real scientific results of modern research with reference to final 
causes and the fundamental principles of philosophy; and fewer 
still are they who are pursuing that study under the conviction that 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 1 29 

all healthful and useful philosophical study must be carried forward 
under the conviction that there is one eternal God and that he is 
the Creator of all things. It is the work of this last-mentioned 
class which we wish most especially to foster. 

There are those who pursue scientific studies from a love of 
nature and of facts, without regard to the connections of facts or to 
general laws. The amateurs of this class resemble the children who 
love the story and care nothing for the moral and pay no attention 
to the style. The serious laborers of this class are useful. They 
may be likened to the makers of brick, who furnish what they can- 
not use ; for they do not know how to draw the design of a house or 
to lay the courses necessary for the erection of a structure, although 
they are far better handlers of brick- molds and burners of brick- 
kilns than the mason and the architect. It has been noticed that it 
rarely falls to anyone man to possess the double faculty of being an 
accurate scientist and a sound philosopher. The contemporary 
scientists whom we most trust to collect the facts in their several 
departments are conspicuously lacking in capability of reasoning on 
their own discoveries. Other men must handle their facts or those 
facts fail to minister to the advancement even of science. 

Then it is well known that there are those who prosecute studies 
in the physical sciences for the purpose of finding facts which they 
may work into some previously adopted scheme of theology or 
atheology. They will not acknowledge as a fact any discovery that 
seems to militate against their pet theory. But if the united testi- 
mony of many trustworthy examiners finally establishes the fact,, 
then they quietly ignore it. They throw away the stone that does 
not fit. This may be well in building a wall ; but in philosophy 
no scheme can stand in front of any one fact which flatly contradicts 
it. The fact will be very calm but very stubborn ; and it does not 
satisfy to have the theory ignore the fact, or when it perceives that 
the fact is contradictory to say contemptuously, " So much the 
worse for the fact." 

We hold that human reason is worth something. If this be true 
then human reason cannot have worked through more than half a 
century of centuries without having formulated at least one state- 
ment which embodies a theory against which there arises no contra- 
9 



I3 o CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

dictory fact. If human reason has not done this much then the 
logical understanding in man is worthless, and the exercise thereof 
may as well be utterly abandoned. Those who are willing to work 
with this Institute believe that there are at least two such state- 
ments ; namely, I. There is an eternal God, and, 2. he is the Cre- 
ator of all things. No atheist would wish to work with us. Those 
who believe that the progress of real science depends upon the 
cultivation of sound philosophy as the nexus of all science, and also 
that all trustworthy philosophy must have a basal truth and that 
that basal truth is the existence of an eternal Creator of all things, 
can work in this Institute, cultivating a vast field and producing 
such bread for the intellectual eater and such seed for the intel- 
lectual sower as shall make future generations rich and glad. 

It may be well to make a survey of the first year's work. On the 
2 1st of July, 1 88 1, in the Hall of Philosophy at Warwick Wood- 
lands, a company of persons adopted a paper as " The Prospectus of 
the American Institute of Christian Philosophy," which indorsed 
the statement of the "objects" of the Institute, with terms of mem- 
bership and subscription, and have since given it wide publicity. 
The seat of the Institute was fixed in New York city, and pro- 
visional officers were elected. The number of members enrolled at 
organization was twenty-three. The first monthly meeting was held 
at Warwick Woodlands on the 28th of August, at which time the 
authorities of the Church of the Strangers tendered the free use of 
their parlors for the office and meetings of the Institute ; and there 
monthly meetings have been held for September, October, Novem- 
ber, and December, 1881, and January, February, March, April, 
May, and June of 1882. No advertisements of these meetings have 
been made, but postal-card notices have been forwarded to mem- 
bers in the vicinity of New York requesting them to invite their 
friends. 

At the first monthly meeting it was determined that there be no 
honorary memberships, in the sense of memberships for which no 
fee has been paid, and to that rule we have rigidly adhered. It 
was also determined that when the Institute had a proper number 
of members in any State there should be elected a vice-president 
for that State ; in accordance with which, during the year, the 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 131 

following gentlemen have been so elected ; namely, William H. 
Allen, LL.D., President of Girard College, for Pennsylvania ; John 
Bascqm, D.D., LL.D., President of the University of Wisconsin, 
for Wisconsin ; Hon. Kemp P. Battle, LL.D., President of the 
University of North Carolina, for North Carolina; Rev. Bishop 
Cheney, for Illinois ; Roswell D. Hitchcock, D.D., LL.D., President 
of the Union Theological Seminary, for New York; Mark Hopkins, 
D.D., LL.D., for Massachusetts; Rev. Bishop Hurst, for Iowa; 
General G. W. Custis Lee, President of Washington and Lee Uni- 
versity, for Virginia ; Rev. Bishop McTyeire, for Tennessee ; 
Patrick H. Mell, D.D., LL.D., Chancellor of the University of 
Georgia, for Georgia ; Francis L. Patton, D.D., LL.D., of the 
Princeton Theological Seminary, for New Jersey ; Noah Porter, 
D.D., LL.D., President of Yale College, for Connecticut, and 
William A. Scott, D.D., LL.D., for California. At the monthly 
meeting for April it was determined to select honorary vice-presi- 
dents from among distinguished gentlemen residing in foreign 
countries who had become members of the American Institute ; in 
accordance with which resolution His Grace the Duke of Argyll, 
the Rt. Hon. the Earl of Shaftesbury, and the Most Rev. Richard 
Chenevix Trench, Archbishop of Dublin, were elected honorary vice- 
presidents. 

At the third monthly meeting a system of by-laws was adopted, 
and has remained unchanged, as originally published. It was also 
ordered that a quarterly publication be issued, and four numbers, 
with the title The Christian Philosophy Quarterly, have appeared, 
bearing the dates of October, 1881, and of January, April, and July, 
1882. It has contained lectures delivered before the Summer 
School of Christian Philosophy at Warwick Woodlands in July, 1881, 
and also papers read before the several monthly meetings by the 
following gentlemen, whose names are given in the order of their 
articles; namely, Chas. F. Deems, President Porter, Professor Bowne, 
Professor Trowbridge, Professor Stephen Alexander, Professor 
Young, Rev. Amory H. Bradford, Rev. Dr. Lyman Abbott, Presi- 
dent Bascom, Professor Winchell, Rev. Dr. J. H. Mcllvaine, Rev. 
Dr. J. W. Mendenhall, Rev. Dr. Bevan, Professor B. N. Martin, 
Rev. S. S. Mar'tyn, and Rev. William L. Ledwith. The Quarterly 



*3 2 



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is hereafter to be published by the Institute, which mails free copies 
to all its members and associate members. 

At the monthly meeting for November, which, on account of 
Thanksgiving, had been postponed to December I, there was 
presented the act incorporating the Institute, with the following 
trustees ; namely, Charles F. Deems, Howard Crosby, Amory H. 
Bradford, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and William O. McDowell. 

At the monthly meeting for January it was resolved to add to 
the "Seven Statements of Objects" the following as the eighth: 
" To interest Christian men and women, learned and unlearned, in 
the production, the circulation, and the reading of the literature 
which shall promote intellectual and religious culture." This para- 
graph was added because it was discovered that many persons be- 
lieved the Institute was intended to be limited in its membership to 
those who had some claim to be considered philosophers. It never 
had occurred to the founders that such a supposition would be enter- 
tained. If the new association had been termed the " Institute of 
Christian Philosophers" and a proclamation had been made through 
the length and breadth of the land inviting all the " Christian Philoso- 
phers" to offer themselves for membership, we feel quite sure that 
the offering would have been very small, and that it would not have 
included a single person who was present at the inception of this 
enterprise. 

It is certainly very desirable that the learned men who have dis- 
tinguished themselves in scientific and philosophical pursuits, and 
who have not found either science or philosophy a guide to athe- 
ism, should give to Christianity the service of enrolling themselves 
in our membership. The Institute would not presume to say to 
those honored gentlemen that it is their duty to do this much for 
our most holy faith ; but as their names are suggested we shall cer- 
tainly discharge our duty of inviting them to membership. Whether 
the men who are able to produce the literature which shall 
neutralize the deleterious influence of agnostic publications become 
our fellow-members or not, we shall endeavor to secure the prod- 
ucts of their genius and learning for our courses of lectures, papers, 
and publications. 

We do not feel so diffident in addressing Christian people who 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 1 33 

are not learned and not able to produce the literature demanded by 
the times. These Christians have money at their command. It 
seems to us that if that be the case they might well reason that 
because they can contribute nothing else it is their plain and 
bounden duty to make an annual contribution of the money neces- 
sary to procure, to print, and to distribute the productions of men 
who, like Agassiz, " have not had time to make money " because 
they have been making the scientific acquirements necessary to 
withstand the assaults of philosophy, falsely so called, on our most 
holy faith. We wish it every -where understood, that those of us who 
are already in the Institute understand membership therein to make 
for the member no other claim than that he gives his sanction to the ob- 
jects of the Institute, and his money to circulate a literature which 
shall promote the advancement of both science and Christianity. The 
most modest man may make that claim ; and the layman most un- 
learned and least able to produce one of the lectures of this course 
should cheerfully hold himself ready to give them the widest circu- 
lation through our schools and colleges, that they may be preserva- 
tive of our young men who are rising into positions of influence. 
There is no more propriety in a man's excusing himself from becom- 
ing a member of the Institute because he cannot produce lectures 
or papers fit to take their place in our courses than there is in a 
man's declining to become a member of the American Bible Society 
because he cannot produce a Bible. 

And now, as I have been the Provisional President of the Insti- 
tute through the first year of its existence, perhaps I may be 
expected — if not, I shall make free — to give the benefits of my 
experience and observation in the shape of advice to the present 
membership, with a view to the consolidation and enlargement of 
the Institute. . . . 

And now, ladies and gentlemen, my year's work as your Provis- 
ional President has been accomplished. You have my hearty 
thanks for the distinction you have conferred on me ; and I do not 
thank you for any thing I have not received. I should not have 
been fit for my place if I had not been thoroughly penetrated by 
the conviction that you made me President, not because you 
wished to say that you believed me to be much of a Christian or 



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any thing of a philosopher, but because you knew that I most 
heartily and sincerely embraced the system of religion known as 
" Christian," that I was greatly interested in the progress of 
scientific pursuits, that I certainly believed that there is no conflict 
between science and religion, and that, if I accepted the presidency 
of the Institute, I would work faithfully for all its interests to the 
best of my ability. This I have honestly done ; and, while it often 
wore me in the doing, now that it is over I thank you most 
cordially for the privilege of doing the work. 

In conclusion, let me express the hope that when you come to 
the election of officers for the next year you will find for your 
President one who can give to the Institute more time, more 
ability, and more money than I have been able to contribute, and, 
above all, one whose contributions to science and philosophy shall 
impart to the chair of the presidency a luster which, you all know 
as well as he does, the Provisional President has not been able to 
bestow. 



SECOND ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS. 

[Delivered before the Summer School of Christian Philosophy, at Atlantic Highlands, N. J., 4th August, 
1883, and repeated at Richfield Springs, N. Y., 25th August, 1883.] 

In coming to the close of the second year of the history of our 
Institute it may be well to recur to matters which concern the 
great work in which we are engaged. 

Darwin in Westminster Abbey. 

Just before our Anniversary Meeting of last year one of the most 
conspicuous figures in the circle of the students of science disap- 
peared from the scene of mortal investigation and discoveries. On 
the nineteenth day of April, A. D. 1882, Charles Darwin was laid 
near Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey. 

That is a simple statement of what appears to have been only the 
interment of a dead man. But it is a fact the significance of which 
will grow with years. Isaac Newton was a great scientist of the 
seventeenth century, and Charles Darwin a great scientist of the 
nineteenth century. The former was an able supporter of the 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 1 35 

Christian faith, and the latter is not known to have ever given it 
any voluntary aid by the exercise of his abilities. He was quick- 
sighted, industrious, and laborious. He enriched the treasury of 
human knowledge. The result of his research led him to the 
adoption of a certain theory as to the origin of man. His theory, 
or some version of it, was used as an argument against Christianity. 
The impression was generally made that no one could be a Dar- 
winian and a Christian at the same time. If the word Darwinian 
included many crude theories that were propagated under the name 
the statement was true. And so for years the cry of multitudes of 
babblers who were opposed to Christianity had filled the air. It 
was, " Up with Darwinism — down with Christianity!" If Christian 
scholars challenged the conclusions which Charles Darwin drew 
from the facts which seemed established the army stragglers of the 
Darwinian camp hooted at them ; and if they assailed the absurd 
theories which attempted to get themselves footing under the name 
of a man to whom science acknowledged its indebtedness the jeers 
and howlings with which these men filled the air were frightful to 
children and amusing to adults. If a man would not tolerate the 
claims of so venerable a religion as Christianity he was not called 
" intolerant ; " he was complimented as " liberal." But if scholarly 
Christians, striving to prove all things, that they might hold fast 
that which is good and true, and therefore making their intellectual 
progress with caution, showed any unwillingness to trust themselves 
to the thin plank of some slender hypothesis thrown over the dash- 
ing stream of some profound difficulty, these cautious Christians 
were called " intolerant." 

Let the men who speak of the intolerance of Christianity consider 
these facts : Mr. Darwin owed his education to the Christian schools. 
He pursued a certain line of studies. He reached certain results 
of hypotheses. They were correct or incorrect. They were op- 
posed to Christianity or not antagonistic thereto. They were read 
and known of all men. Christian scholars knew them as well as 
Mr. Darwin did. The chief shrine of one great section of Chris- 
tianity is Westminster Abbey, in London. The guardians of that 
structure are Christian scholars. These men gave official permission 
for the interment of Charles Darwin near the dust of Isaac Newton. 



i3<5 



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Now, one of two things follows — either the teachings of Darwin 
were in accordance with the teachings of Christianity or else the 
Christianity of the nineteenth century can never again be accused 
of intolerance by any who are not perversely uncandid. If it should 
be insinuated that the authorities of Westminster Abbey acted on 
their personal feelings, and did not represent the spirit of our mod- 
ern Christianity, this is to be replied : To the best of our knowledge 
and belief no quarterly, monthly, weekly or daily publication in the 
interest of Christianity, over any responsible Christian name, has 
uttered the slightest insinuation of condemnation of this West- 
minster interment. 

Where, now, is the "intolerance?" How have the haters of 
Christ and his religion showed tolerance? Suppose Charles Darwin 
had even been fool enough to father all the bastard theories that 
have been a-tramp in his name, and yet because of the real value 
of his real work in the field of science Christianity entombs 
him with defenders of the faith who were very much more illus- 
trious as scientists than himself, what verdict must the impartial 
world give to that act, if not the verdict of the highest proper ap- 
preciation of science by Christianity? 

That Christianity indorses any thing taught by Mr. Darwin 
which is really or even apparently antagonistic to Christianity, and 
especially that Christianity indorses the driveling, idiotic teachings 
of many who go under Mr. Darwin's name, is simply absurd. It is 
just as absurd as if, because Westminster Abbey had given place to 
John Wesley and his brother Charles, the Church of England 
should be supposed to indorse not only the nobler forms of Wes- 
leyanism, but also all the small and sometimes ridiculous sects which 
claim John Wesley's honored name. 

And now we turn upon these whirling and howling dervishes 
who strive to conceal their folly by assuming the name of science, 
and we demand of them to know whether, if they had a shrine 
in which to entomb the scientific men that departed this life, they 
would admit men of science who where Christians. Would not the 
bare fact that the man was a Christian, no matter what his attain- 
ments might be in science, exclude him from a place in the West- 
minster Abbey of infidelity? If any man ridicule that question, upon 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 137 

reflection we join in the laugh ; for it is simply absurd to think of any 
thing like a Westminster Abbey growing up from the midst of the 
vain babblers who are chattering about the intolerance of Christianity. 
On the minds of all the nobler men engaged in science, who at 
the same time have not yet embraced Christianity, there must come 
a solemn sense of the breadth as well as the depth of our religion, 
as on the floor of Westminster Abbey, near Newton's honored dust, 
they stand beside the grave of Charles Darwin. 

Important Document. 

Soon after Mr. Darwin's death there was published a letter writ- 
ten by him to a student at Jena, in whom the study of Darwin's 
book had raised religious difficulties. At first there were doubts 
as to the genuineness of the paper, which, however, was at last con- 
ceded. This melancholy document is dated June 5, 1879, anc * was 
published in the number for October, 1882, of the Rundschau, in a 
lecture by Professor Haeckel on " Die Naturanschauung von Dar- 
win, Goethe, and Laplace." The authenticity of the letter is 
vouched for by Professor Haeckel, who is entirely familiar with Mr. 
Darwin's handwriting. 

This is the letter: 

"Sir : I am very busy, and am an old man in delicate health, and have not time 
to answer your questions fully, even assuming that they are capable of being an- 
swered at all. Science and Christ have nothing to do with each other, except in 
as far as the habit of scientific investigation makes a man cautious about accepting 
any proofs. As far as I am concerned I do not believe that any revelation has 
ever been made. With regard to a future life, every one must draw his own con- 
clusions from vague and contradictory probabilities. Wishing you well, I remain, 
your obedient servant, Charles Darwin." 

The whole weight of his character and attainments Mr. Darwin 
throws into the scale against Christianity. He will be quoted by 
thousands of young men to justify their neglect not only of Chris- 
tian studies, but also of Christian duties. 

Let such young men give careful examination to this record. See 
its admissions. It admits its writer to be old and in delicate health, 
and the whole tone is of one who is sadly invalided. This naturally 
gifted old man as he sinks toward the grave regards worms as a 
more important study than the greatest figure in all human history J 



138 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

As if science had nothing to do with humanity, but only with in- 
organic things and insensate forces, or, at the highest, with the 
orders of living things below man, and this after he had written on 
" the Descent of Man." If Canon Farrar were a person given to 
sarcasm the text from which he preached in Westminster Abbey on 
Mr. Darwin's death might seem to have been employed as a grim 
joke. It was, " And he spake of trees, from the cedar-tree that is 
in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall; 
he spake also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of 
fishes." (1 Kings iv, 33.) But he said he had not time to settle 
the most important questions concerning the race of which he was 
a member. That statement should deprive his letter of all weight 
upon Christianity. Suppose he had had tenfold more intellectual 
power than fell to him, or any other man, the statement which shows 
that he had not examined the questions with w'frich religion is con- 
cerned should set aside his testimony. In a court of law, in some 
great steam-boat suit, for instance, if a question turned upon mechan- 
ics and the Chief-Justice of the United States were a witness, and 
should affirm that he had not time to answer the questions fully, 
even assuming that they are capable of being answered at all — that 
law and mechanics have nothing to do with each other except as 
law makes a man cautious about accepting proofs — would his testi- 
mony have the slightest weight with an intelligent juror? There 
are men, the equals intellectually of the Chief-Justice of the United 
States, as he himself would frankly admit, who have had time to 
study mechanics and who are capable of answering questions in that 
department. They are the men to call to the stand. There are 
men who are Charles Darwin's equals in intellect, who have had 
time and ability to examine this question. Their testimony is 
worth something on this subject, while Mr. Darwin's is worth noth- 
ing, not because he had not ability, but because he had not time, or 
had not inclination, to examine this branch of human study. It is 
admitted on all hands that it is no disparagement to any man's intel- 
ligence to have his testimony set aside in matters of which he con- 
fesses he has no knowledge. 

But, having so confessed, does it not glaringly reveal that lack of 
logical discrimination which was such a conspicuous defect in Mr. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



139 



Darwin, that he should immediately make a most dogmatic state- 
ment about the very thing of which he acknowledges his ignorance? 
" Science and Christ have nothing to do with each other ! " This 
old man, very busy, and in very delicate health, makes this very 
positive assertion. Has he studied science as little as he studied 
Christ ? Certainly not, else he would not be able to say any thing 
about either ; and his fame rests on his scientific studies. Has he 
studied Christ as much as he has studied science? He owns that 
he has not. Then what right has he to express an opinion on the 
subject ? Yet he dogmatizes ridiculously. " Science and Christ 
nothing to do with each other?" Then what has science" to 
do with ? " Are there any phenomena which science must not 
examine ? Has science to do with the worm at my feet, with the 
stone beneath my feet, with the evanescent thermometric phe- 
nomena about my person, yet nothing to do with a phenomenal 
man whose appearance in the midst of the ages has changed the 
whole face of philosophy, science, art, and civilization ? Really we 
might be curious to know what limit Mr. Charles Darwin puts to 
science. 

But there seem to be no limits to his disposition to dogmatize in 
his old age and failing health about things of which he confesses 
himself ignorant. He proceeds to tell the young student at Jena 
something on the subject of revelation : " I do not believe that any 
revelation has ever been made." " Ever " covers measureless dura- 
tion. Mr. Darwin is equal to the task not only of boldly expressing 
a definite opinion in regard to that of which he confesses ignorance, 
but also of oracularly including all time and space in his opinions. 
There is in the world, and was known to Mr. Darwin, that which 
makes claim to be " a revelation." Those claims have been ex- 
amined by the greatest minds in the later centuries and admitted. 
Had Mr. Darwin examined those claims ? If he had, and they had 
appeared inconclusive, then there was no obligation so imperative 
upon him as to exhibit the ground on which he rejected them. No 
other question of science — for this is a question of science — was so 
important to be settled. No study of species or individual equaled 
this in importance. If he had not examined those claims of revela- 
tion and yet had fixed opinions, what weight should we attach to 



I 4 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

such opinions on a subject of which he was ignorant, of such a 
busy old man in delicate health ? 

But the secret of this inconsistency came out later. The letter to 
a student at Jena induces Dr. Robert Lcwins to write to the Jour- 
nal of Science : 

Before concluding I may, without violation of any confidence, mention that, both 
viva voce and in writing, Mr. Darwin was much less reticent than in his letter to 
Jena. For, in answer to the direct question I felt myself justified, some years 
since, in addressing to that immortal expert in biology as to the bearing of his re- 
searches on the existence of an anima or soul in man, he distinctly stated that, in 
his opinion, a vital, or "spiritual " principle, apart from inherent, somatic energy, 
had no more locus standi in the human than in the other races of the animal king- 
dom — a conclusion that seems a mere corollary of, or indeed a position tanta- 
mount with, his essential doctrine of human and bestial identity of nature and 
genesis. 

This is the upshot of the whole system*— men and brutes have 
identity, mind and soul are nothing more than instinct greatly de- 
veloped, but still showing only such intelligence as is exhibited by 
climbing plants and earth-worms, so that there is no moral respon- 
sibility and no assured future to a man or to mankind ! And this 
is a discovery which we are asked to believe to be equal to New- 
ton's discovery of the law of gravitation ! Poor old man ! On the 
question of his existence beyond the grave he knew nothing but 
" vague and contradictory probabilities," and he had not time to 
determine which were weightier, and so he whose name has been 
most spoken in scientific circles during the last quarter of a century 
of his life died in the dark, and in the cold. If this be all that such 
a system can give, the world of human hearts now hungering for 
bread will certainly reject this stone by whatsoever hand it may be 
offered. 

Allen in Girard College. 

The entombment of Mr. Darwin in Westminster naturally 
recalls another incident which may seem in contrast and suggest 
lessons. 

In the city of Philadelphia there is a college amply built and en- 
dowed by a man who is claimed by the opponents of Christianity. 
The founder, Stephen Girard, provided in his will for the perpetua- 
tion of the endowment on the express terms that no clergyman of 
any denomination, Catholic or Protestant, should be admitted to 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



141 



the grounds or permitted to enter the college. The late president 
of that college, William H. Allen, LL.D., died. He was a man of 
extraordinary culture, as well as of remarkable ability. He was a 
Christian scientist, and he had been honored by the highest recog- 
nition the American Christians can bestow upon a layman in being 
elected to the presidency of the American Bible Society. As a 
scientific man he would have honored membership in any philo- 
sophical or scientific association. He was also one of the vice- 
presidents of the American Institute of Christian Philosophy. 

Upon assuming the presidency of Girard College he felt himself 
shut in from intercourse with his Christian brethren who were eccle- 
siastics. When he was a professor of natural sciences in one of our 
colleges he had a pupil whom he impressed powerfully, and by the fas- 
cination of his methods of teaching drew the youth to scientific pur- 
suits, which he has never since wholly abandoned. By an accident 
in the laboratory, which Professor Allen always charged to himself, 
although his pupil never did, the young man was so seriously injured 
that at one time his life was despaired of. But he recovered, and 
afterward became professor in a university. Between the two men 
there grew a very strong friendship. The young professor became a 
clergyman, and on a visit to Philadelphia called to see President Allen 
at Girard College. He was refused admittance. W T hen Dr. Allen 
learned who was in the porter's lodge he rushed to meet his former 
pupil, his face all aglow with excitement, and exclaimed, " Does it 
not seem a shame that I live in a house which you cannot enter! " If 
this young man had been a liar, a thief, an adulterer, or a murderer, 
he might have had free access ; but he was a Christian clergyman. 

The president of Girard College, taken suddenly so ill within the 
precincts that he could not have been removed, might have lingered 
there and died without being able to look into the eyes of his father, 
his brother, or his son, if those gentlemen had been living and had 
been in orders in a Christian Church. He could neither have re- 
ceived nor given parting benedictions. He would have been cut off 
from intercourse with his spiritual adviser. As it was, the remains 
of this great man had to be carried out of the college to receive the 
decencies of a Christian funeral at the hands of the ministers of the 
religion he professed. 



I 4 2 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

And this is the " liberality " of the opponents of Christianity ! 

Now, suppose a case. Suppose some rich Christian should die 
and by bequest found an institution of any kind and perpetuate 
the endowment thereof on the exclusion of every professed teacher 
of science, what would then be thought or said ? Or, suppose that 
by the terms of the will there should be excluded from the grounds 
and buildings any man who did not believe in the plenary inspira- 
tion of the Holy Scriptures and the divine rulership of Jesus over 
the universe of matter and of mind, what would then be thought 
and said? 

If there be any person who can produce on the side of Christians 
an example of illiberality which can match that which is seen in 
Allen dead in Girard, or on the side of anti-Christians an example of 
liberality which can be painted as the companion picture to Darwin 
buried in Westminster, it is that gentleman's turn to speak next. 

Pasteur among "The Immortals." 

Among the incidents of the past year it is natural that Christian 
scholars should revert with interest to the reception into the French 
Academy, into the company of the forty so-called " Immortals," of 
M. Pasteur, the clebrated Christian scientist. Succeeding to the 
chair of Littre, the late distinguished Positivist, he owes his place to 
no favoritism, but has won it by his commanding talents and learn- 
ing. Called by the custom of the Academy to pronounce a eulogy 
on his predecessor, M. Pasteur is represented as having captivated 
his brilliant audience by his modesty, while he spoke nevertheless 
with the authority of a savant. The fact that M. Pasteur openly 
acknowledges that in all his discoveries he sees the hand of God 
makes the following words remarkable, as having been uttered by a 
renowned unbeliever in regard to a scientist who is a professed 
Christian. It was M. Renan who thus addressed M. Pasteur : 

There is something that we can recognize in the most diverse tendencies, some- 
thing which belongs alike to Galileo, Pascal, Michael Angelo, and Moliere, some- 
thing which forms the sublimity of the poet, the depth of the philosopher, the 
fascination of the orator, and the divination of the savant. This indefinable affla- 
tus, sir, we have found in you — it is genius. No one has traversed with a step so 
pure as yours the circles of elementary nature. Your scientific life is like a lumi- 
nous train in the great darkness of the infinitely small, in those deepest abysses of 
being where life springs. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 1 43 

If the good and gifted M. Pasteur has read in the Revue des Deux 
Mondes of November, 1882, the last of the series of articles which 
M. Renan has been writing on his own life it must have taken all 
the sweetness out of the compliment. In that article M. Renan 
says : 

Were I to begin my life over again I would change nothing in it. ... A cer- 
tain lack of frankness in the commerce of life will be forgiven to me by my friends ; 
they will attribute it to my clerical education. I admit that in the first part of my 
life I told lies often enough, not for gain's sake, but on account of my natural 
goodness, also through contempt, and from the false idea which I always had to 
present things in a way that one could understand them. Oftentimes my sister 
forcibly showed me the inconveniences of acting in this way, and finally I ceased so 
to do. Since 1851 I do not believe I have uttered a single lie, except naturally 
some entertaining ones, pure entrapelias, some officious ones, and some for 
politeness' sake, which all casuists permit, and the little literary subterfuges forced 
upon me, in view of a superior truth, by well-balanced sentences, etc. 

He is not positive that he has not lied since 185 1 ; but he thinks 
he has not. Now, a man whose " natural goodness " made him a 
" liar," on his own confession, through so many years of his life, can 
scarcely be supposed to have so suddenly become so much worse 
{nemo repente turpissimus /) as to have descended to the baseness of 
truth ! How much " officiousness '' may have entered into his com- 
pliment of M. Pasteur no one can tell, but its real truth all who 
know the new academician will admit, whether it was uttered for 
politeness' sake or otherwise. But Renan's admission of " literary 
subterfuges " renders all his writings worthless except as specimens 
of rhetoric. Any thing he may have said for or against Jesus or the 
apostles may have been a mere " literary subterfuge." 

The President of the British Association. 

The meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of 
Science closed the first year of its second half century at Southamp- 
ton. Its president was Dr. C. W. Siemens. In introducing his suc- 
cessor Sir J. Lubbock said that " the ruling idea of Dr. Siemens's 
life had been to economize and utilize the forces of nature for the 
benefit of man," and called attention to the fact that to him we 
owe various fruitful improvements in the practical applications of 
electricity — the first electric railway, the electrical transmission of 
power, anastatic printing, the chronometric governor, the regene- 



144 



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rator engine and furnace, and the regenerator gas furnace. The 
address of Dr. Siemens was masterly, and was full of practical 
thought and scientific information. . It contained none of the crudi- 
ties and unscientific credulities which have disfigured the addresses 
of some of his predecessors. It taught the comforting lesson that 
God is a willing and ready co-operator with every earnest, honest, 
humble laborer, and it gave many illustrations of this principle. It 
was pleasant to hear such a man as Dr. Siemens conclude his ad- 
dress from the chair of the president of the British Association by 
a reference to the conservation of the solar energy (theoretically 
premised by himself in March, 1882, and now, in part at least, actu- 
ally observed by astronomers) and then to see him led to make such 
reflections as these : " We find that in the great workshop of nature 
there are no lines of demarkation to be drawn between the most ex- 
alted speculation and common-place practice ; in the conditions of 
solar and stellar spaces we recognize principles of high perfection ap- 
plicable also to humble purposes of human life. All knowledge must 
lead up to one great result, that of an intelligent recognition of the 
Creator through his works." 

Scientific Dogmatists. 

Certain of the scientists who are not in the front rank of thinkers 
are addicted to a dogmatism the sight of which should arrest the 
attention and correct the habits of any theologian who may have a 
tendency to walk in that way. They have no hesitation in declar- 
ing that their knowledge of " the laws of nature" renders it impos- 
sible for them to accept the teachings of Scripture ; and some 
imperfectly instructed Christians tremble as they listen to them. 
But the British Church Congress was rendered memorable by the 
reading of a letter from an eminent man of science, in which he de- 
clared that the so-called "laws of nature," which are really merely 
human generalizations from facts observed in God's universe, are 
by no means so certain as is commonly supposed. Unable to be 
present to take part in the debate which followed the reading of 
Professor Stokes's admirable paper on the Harmony of Science and 
Faith, Dr. Andrew Clarke, her majesty's physician, sent a note 
which was read by the president. He said : 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. I45 

I take advantage of this hurried note to express the hope that in dealing with 
the relations of science and religion some one will point out what I have not my- 
self seen pointed out — (i) that there is nothing absolute in the whole objective 
world ; no absolute standard of mass, quality or duration ; that the knowledge of 
an absolute primitive weight of atoms is impossible, and that what we call the 
ordinary weight of a body is not a thing of itself alone, but a product of the body 
by which it is attracted, the distance between them, and the disturbances occa- 
sioned by other invisible but active forces ; (2) that the assumption constituting 
the fundamental axiom of modern physics, that all true explanations of natural 
phenomena are mechanical, is incompatible with demonstrable facts ; (3) that the 
progress of chemistry is becoming more and more irreconcilable with the theory 
of the atomic constitution of matter ; (4) that there is no law of physics, not 
even the law of gravitation, without great growing exceptions, and no theory of 
physical phenomena, not even the undulatory theory of light, which is not now 
becoming more and more inadequate to explain the facts discovered within its 
area of comprehension ; (5) and that, therefore, the boasted accuracy and per- 
manency of so-called physical laws and theories is unfounded ; that very probably 
the greater part of the so-called axioms of modern physics will be swept away as 
untenable : that theories of natural phenomena, apparently the most comprehen- 
sive and conclusive, are merely provisional ; at present finality in this region is 
neither visible, attainable, nor clearly conceivable, and that after all there may be 
methods of spiritual verification which, within their condition, scope, and use, 
may compare not unfavorably with the methods so confidently depended upon in 
physical research. 

Victoria Institute. 

The Victoria Institute of Great Britain, whose president in his 
late Annual Address made such kind allusions to the American In- 
stitute, its younger sister, continues to do its work with a zeal 
which attracts attention and an ability which commands respect. 
During the year a careful analysis was made by Professor Stokes, 
F.R.S., Sir J. R. Bennett, Vice-President R.S., Professor Beale, 
F.R.S., and others, of the various theories of evolution, without 
meeting any scientific evidence to prove or even give countenance 
to the theory that man had been evolved from a lower order of 
animals. Even Professor Virchow declares that there is a complete 
absence of any fossil type of a lower stage in the development of 
man ; and that any positive advance in the province of prehistoric 
anthropology has actually removed us further from proofs of con- 
nection with the inferior animal kingdom. In this Professor Bar- 
rande, the eminent Italian paleontologist, concurs, declaring that in 
none of his investigations has he found any one fossil species de- 
veloped into another. In fact, the report goes on to state that it 
10 



146 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

seems that no scientific man has yet discovered a link between 
man and the ape, between fish and frog, or between the vertebrate 
and the invertebrate animals ; nor is there any evidence of any one 
species losing its peculiar characteristics to acquire new ones belong- 
ing to other species. 

Among other matters that came before the Institute were the 
investigations of Hormuzd Rassam in Nineveh and Babylon, and 
his discovery of Sepharvaim, one of the earliest cities mentioned in 
Scripture. It was announced that the result of explorations now 
being carried on in Egypt would be laid before the Institute early in 
the winter. The discoveries in this .field are represented as being 
very important, especially that of the site of Succoth, which is 
absolutely confirmatory of the sacred record. Mr. Rassam is also a 
member of the American Institute of Christian Philosophy, and has 
communicated a paper on the subject to the American Institute, 
which will be read at one of its earliest meetings. Professor Stokes, 
who was on the committee named above, is the successor of Sir 
Isaac Newton in the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics in 
Cambridge University, and is a member of the American Institute 
of Christian Philosophy. 

Joseph Cook's Work. 

It would seem to be in the line of this review to speak of the 
course of Monday lectures delivered last winter in Boston by Joseph 
Cook, a valued member of this Institute. Mr. Cook's recent voyage 
around the world enriched his active mind with fresh materials. 
Much of that course of lectures was outside our line of work, but 
was popular and powerful, and always manifestly designed to 
make for the defense and propagation of" the truth as it in Jesus." 
There is one passage which I reproduce because of its present 
interest as a picture of contemporaneous opinion, and because of 
the value I am sure it will have to future historians of the progress 
of philosophy. It is this : 

It is a characteristic of the more cultured circles in England, and especially in 
Scotland, to ridicule the vagueness, evasiveness, slatternliness, and untenableness 
of materialistic and agnostic definitions of matter and life. 

You cannot live in the more cultured circles of Great Britian a month without 
greatly diminishing your respect for agnosticism and materialism. Yes ; but you 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 14; 

say, "England is the home of agnosticism." So it is. "The chief defenders of 
materialism are in Great Britain." So they are ; but I am profoundly convinced, 
after conversations with the leaders of philosophical thought in university centers 
and elsewhere in the British Islands, that really advanced thinking in England is 
fundamentally anti-materialistic, anti-agnostic, and so really anti-Spencerian. You 
are sitting one day in Edinburgh, with a company of learned men, at table at 
dinner, and one of them says Herbert Spencer cannot read German. You think 
that must be a mistake, and turn to Professor Calderwood and say, " Is it true ? 
That is a strange assertion." " I have always understood it to be the truth." You 
ask the views of the whole company and find that not a man doubts the assertion. 
Agnosticism, as represented by Spencer, has a very poor following north of the 
Tweed. You are in the study of Lionel Beale one day in London, Herbert Spen- 
cer's home, and he says: "That man's books contain so much false physiology 
that they will not be read ten years after his death except as literary curiosities." 
And Lionel Beale is supposed to know something of physiology. You are after- 
ward in Germany, and you find that Herbert Spencer is regarded as a bright 
man indeed, but by no means as a leader of philosophical thought. In short, as 
compared with Herman Lotze, you hear Herbert Spencer called a charlatan. It 
pains you not a little to find that your own country has large circles that follow 
him so loyally. It pains you to find that there is a British materialistic school. 
One day you express this view in company to professors of Edinburgh and Glas- 
gow, and one of them turns upon you somewhat sternly and says : " There is no 
British materialistic school. Britain includes Scotland and England. There is no 
Scotch materialistic school. There is no English materialistic school. If there is 
any materialistic school in these islands it is a London and a Cockney material- 
istic school." This is Professor Tait of Edinburgh. You hear the same sentiment 
expressed by Professor Veitch, of Glasgow, the biographer of Sir William Hamil- 
ton. But there is an Alexander Bain in Scotland who defines matter, in the 
agnostic Spencerian way, " a double-faced somewhat, physical on one side, and 
spiritual on the other." You ask Lionel Beale what he thinks of this definition, 
and he says: "It is obvious nonsense." You quote that opinion to Professor 
Veitch or to a dozen others whom I will not have the pedantry to name, and you 
will find them all repudiating this central key-stone of modern materialistic 
theories. . . . Give me the recent volume of Professor Bowne, of Boston University, 
a pupil of Lotze, rather than the work of any pupil of Herbert Spencer, who is not 
spoken of with profound intellectual respect in the circles of the most advanced 
thought with which I have acquaintance in the Old World. Do not misunderstand 
me. This man has immense influence abroad. His scheme of thought is applied 
to all classes of subjects by a certain arrogant and noisy school of writers. But I 
am distinguishing between thought advanced enough to be really first class and 
that which is not more than third, or fourth, or fifth class. 



The School at Princeton. 

Another distinguished member of the American Institute of Chris- 
tian Philosophy, President McCosh, has during the last year made 
a movement which will be productive of great good at Princeton 
and probably lead to similar movements in other great colleges. It 



148 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



is the establishment of an enlarged department of philosophy. The 

distinguished president in a note as to this department says : 

I mean to continue my instruction in psychology, the history of philosophy, and 
discussions in contemporary philosophy, adding, if requested, a short course on 
aesthetics. Dr. Shields will lecture on the interesting topics connected with the 
relation of science and religion. Professor Sloane, who was for years secretary 
to Mr. Bancroft, the historian, and lately an acceptable professor cf Latin in 
Princeton College, has been appointed Professor of the Philosophy of History and 
of Political Science, including Government. Professor Osborn, an ex-fellow of 
this College, and who stood first in the intercollegiate contest in mental science, 
and lately a successful professor in the State University of Minnesota, has been 
appointed Professor of Logic, Deductive and Inductive, and will next year also 
teach ethics. It is intended, if possible, during the coming year to appoint a pro- 
fessor of moral philosophy, theological and practical, and also a professor of 
jurisprudence and political economy. These six chairs will constitute a school of 
philosophy. The professors will give instruction in the under-graduate, but also 
in the post-graduate courses, discussing the important questions of the day in 
speculative philosophy, in social and economic Science. Four of these depart- 
ments, and I believe a fifth, will be in operation the coming year (1883-84), and 
the sixth as soon as the proper person can be had. In addition, Professor Pat- 
ton, of the Theological Seminary, will give a short course of lectures on the 
higher metaphysics, and Professor Scott and Professor Osborn, who have specially 
studied the subject in London, Cambridge, and Heidelberg, as well as in this Col- 
lege, will lecture on the relation of the brain and nerves to the mind. 

We can have no doubt that the instruction given in this depart- 
ment will fulfill the learned president's hope " of raising and foster- 
ing an American school of philosophy, as distinguished from the 
a priori school of Germany, and the materialistic physiological 
schools of England." 

It is pleasant to recognize in this faculty four learned gentlemen 
who are now members of the American Institute of Philosophy, 
and to know that already large funds have been pledged to the 
success of the enterprise. It is hoped that these laborious scholars 
will hereafter enrich the schools and meetings of our Institute with 
the results of studies which we are all sure will be conducted with 
Christian humility as well as with scientific carefulness. . . . 

Last Words. 

If the President may speak of himself he will only take the oc- 
casion to express his heartfelt thanks to all who have afforded him 
help in the responsible labors of his position during the past year by 
their personal sympathy, by their efforts to lengthen the list of our 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 1 49 

membership, and by financial aid in promoting the circulation of 
our publications and in beginning a permanent endowment. And he 
could not close without a solemn utterance of his confirmed faith 
in the truths revealed in the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New 
Testament, and in God's personal interest in men's discovery of 
whatsoever truth there is in the universe. 



THIRD ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS. 

[Delivered before the American Institute, at Key-East, N. J., 17th July, 1884 ; and repeated at Richfield 
Springs, N. Y., 25th August, 1884.] 

We close the third year of the history of the American Institute 
of Christian Philosophy. It is expected that the President shall 
note the event by some remarks. 

Grounds of Encouragement. 

In looking over the whole field, both of the special work of the 
Institute and of the general condition of intellectual, moral, and 
religious movement, there does not seem to be, upon the whole, 
any thing to dampen the ardor of those who love " the truth as it 
is in Jesus." 

Modified Tone of Opponents. 

On the contrary, there seem to be increasing grounds of encour- 
agement for all earnest Christian thinkers and workers. Those who 
recollect the tone of the few non-Christian scientists of twenty years 
ago, and compare it with their modes of utterance of to-day, will 
perceive a very great change. Then it was dominant, supercilious, 
overbearing. Whoever did not accept every fresh and crude 
hypothesis which seemed antagonistic to the claim of the Bible and 
Christianity was treated as a stubborn fool or a pitiable simpleton. 
And in some circles the claims of a supernatural religion were 
scarcely regarded as deserving the slightest attention from a man of 
sense. That manner has not yet totally disappeared, but it has 
been greatly modified. As discussions have gone forward it has 
been ascertained that there were more men of brains, respectable 
for their scientific attainments and philosophical abilities, among the 



l5 o CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

friends than among the foes of supernatural religion. The mere 
bandying of words has been exchanged for a wrestling-match in 
which the sneerers at Christian truth have been surprised to find 
what muscle there was in the men who had neither imitated their 
braggadocio nor were intimidated by it. Each new-comer has been 
challenged. Each scientific hypothesis, as propounded, has been 
carefully examined. The instruments of scientific tests have been 
as skillfully employed on the one side as on the other. 

Increase of Literature in Our Department. 

The excitement of debate has stimulated the activity of produc- 
tion. The last quarter of a century has produced a scientific litera- 
ture created by men of profound religious convictions — a scientific 
and philosophical literature surpassing all that has appeared in all 
the preceding Christian centuries. Associated efforts like those put 
forth by the Victoria Institute of Great Britain and the American 
Institute of Christian Philosophy have brought out papers and 
lectures exposing the fallacies of the anti-Christians and demon- 
strating how wholly unhurt was the true faith of simple and child- 
like men by all the subtle reasonings of those who could see noth- 
ing in the great volume of nature but arguments against the ex- 
istence of its author. 

In that high and healthy literature, every year commanding more 
and more attention, several things have been shown, (i) Much that 
had been assumed to be settled on a scientific basis and to be deadly 
to Christianity has been shown to have no rational basis whatever. 
(2) Much other has been shown to be manifestly mere conjecture 
which has not yet made good its claim to be considered knowledge, 
and the assumption of any force it may have against a supernal 
religion to be puerile. (3) In whatever has been demonstrated to 
be real science it has been shown that there is nothing which can 
reasonably be held to be antagonistic to the religion taught in the 
Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. (4) And beyond all that, from 
the results of scientific research and philosophical examination, 
there has begun to be gathered a great store of facts and arguments 
which go to confirm men's faith in revealed truth and to corroborate 
and illustrate its teaching. So it has come to pass that theoretical 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 15 1 

religion has to-day a better footing among thoughtful men than it 
ever had before. 

Christian Books. 

While great progress has been made in the production of scien- 
tific and philosophical literature for those who have the time, the 
ability, and the inclination for studies that are exacting, there has 
been an increase of books distinctly Christian, didactic, and devo- 
tional. More Bibles, prayer-books, and sermons have been printed 
and sold, or otherwise distributed, than in any former quarter of a 
century. The publishers of religious literature find no falling off in 
the market. In this country there has also been some demand for 
anti-Christian books, which can readily be understood ; but it does 
not seem to be growing, and the publishers of that class of litera- 
ture have been represented as saying that the calls for their publica- 
tions are largely from Christian scholars who have a natural scholarly 
desire to see what new thing can be said on the other side. 

Increase of Christian Effort. 

There seems also to be no diminution of Christian effort, but 
rather an increase. There are more churches built than ever be- 
fore ; there are more men devoting their lives to the propagation of 
Christian principles and the extension of Christian work ; there are 
more mission stations in all parts of the world in 1884 than there 
were in any previous year ; there are more church communicants in 
Christendom in proportion to population than ever before ; there 
are more persons in attendance on the public services of religion 
and more children early taught religious truths than ever before ; and 
there are very many more thousands of dollars given for the propaga- 
tion of the Christian faith than ever found such an outlet since the 
prophet of Galilee was accustomed to say : " It is more blessed to 
give than to receive." The hold of Christianity upon the minds of 
our young men of culture is, notwithstanding all the active skepti- 
cism of the age, stronger than it ever was before. The latest re- 
port of the college Young Men's Christian Associations in the 
United States and Canada gives returns from 170 colleges, embrac- 
ing nearly 35,000 students and containing all the larger colleges, 
Harvard alone excepted. Fourteen thousand of this number are 



I 52 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

church members, and over 1,500 have professed conversion during 
the past college year. Attempts have been made by the enemy to 
disparage the progress of Christianity by striving to create the im- 
pression that the opposite state of affairs exists. A resort to 
statistics shows that the several statements made above are in 
accordance with the facts. Now, surely, if Christian faith and 
principles were dying out in the world it would be impossible 
to account for the great, vigorous, living growth of Christian 
activity.* 

Outside Christianity. 

We are apt to think of Christianity only as set forth by some 
form of ecclesiastical system. Men are coming to see that this is a 
mistake ; that there are Jews who have never been circumcised and 
Christians who have never been baptized. In places where and 
at times when there has been observed a breaking away from 
theologic dogmas and churchly forms there has also been observed 
a solemn sense among men of the existence of the supernatural 
world and the rightful claims of moral obligations. Many thought- 
ful men think they have come to see that the existence of each 
ecclesiastical organization is due solely to " the importance imputed 
to some form of theological statement or church administration." 
When such men retreat from dedicating their lives to the mere 
keeping up of church forms they do not thereby become irreligious; 
they are too religious to pursue any other course. 

Then the spirit of Christ and of his religion is spreading outside 
all the Churches and stimulating to much active humane work. 
There are many who would not acknowledge themselves Christians be- 
cause they have an idea that this involves certain professions they 
are not ready to assume, who, nevertheless, are actuated by Chris- 



* A few items which have fallen under notice while this address was in course of preparation 
may be worth preserving : During the last decade Protestantism in this country has contributed 
for missions, home and foreign, $56,136,636. In the decade beginning with 1810, the amount of 
contributions for these objects was $206,210. Every ten years show a large and steady increase. 
Last year the women of the United States gave $600,000 toward Christianizing the heathen. 
Of this large sum Presbyterian women gave nearly $200,000 ; Baptist women, $156,000 ; 
Northern Methodist women, $108,000, and Southern Methodist women, $26,500. The 
Methodist Church Extension Board has received $2,500,000 in its twenty years' history, with 
which it has built 4,500 houses of worship, with 1,000,000 sitiings, that are now worth 
$8,000,000. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



153 



tian motives and are doing Christian work as much and " as faithfully 
as the average member of a church." " Multitudes who are rarely- 
seen inside a church are governed to a considerable extent by the 
ideas of duties which Christ has diffused far beyond the church 
circle. Multitudes who are strangers to the Christ of formal 
theology recognize the Christ of the gospels as the great Friend 
and Brother of man, and his golden rule and law of neighborly 
benevolence as of divine authority/' (From Unconscious Chris- 
tianity, by Rev. James M. Whiton, in the The New Englander, 
May, 1884.) 

If we look outside of Christian Churches and their attendants at 
those who have openly expressed their want of faith in a super- 
natural religion there are signs which are far from discouraging. 

Infidels Desponding. 

The men who are laboring to destroy Christianity do not grow 
happy. There is a certain exhilaration while their bright but in- 
jurious books bring them copyright, and while crowds of men are 
found willing, for reasons which bring no credit to their minds 
or their hearts, to pay a dollar each and contribute also their 
applause to a preacher of blasphemy; but as life wears on, 
and as there comes to such men a revelation of the probable 
effects of their teaching on the future of society, they grow very 
despondent. 

M. Renan is reported to have said : " We are living on the per- 
fume of an empty vase. Our children will have to live on the 
shadow of a shadow. Their children, I fear, will have to live on 
something less." 

It would be almost cruel to ask this brilliant writer who they are 
that have emptied the vase, and who they are that have spent their 
strength in taking the substance out of all human life so that noth- 
ing but the shadows should be left. But should he be spared that 
keen question unless he frankly repent, and employ the remainder 
of his life in laboring to neutralize the poison he has so insidiously 
injected into society and which now infects him and produces a 
deadly despondency? 

We have, however, comfort for him and for all his class. Their 



154 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

grandchildren will live in an age of increasing Christian activity ; in 
an age when Christianity will be more stripped of ecclesiasticism 
than now, and the mind of the Spirit in the word of God will be 
better known, and there shall be an increase of that faith which 
rounds out reason and complements the barrenness of this life 
with the fruitfulness of the life to come. They will have something 
better than perfume and more substantial than shadows. 

Now let all men pause and consider the pitifulness of this case. 
A few gifted men have been employing their powers in accumulat- 
ing an estate for posterity, and a leader of them thus makes state- 
ment of the assets of the estate : in hand, " the perfume of an 
empty vase ;" for the next generation, " the shadow of a shadow ;" 
for the third generation, " something less.'' No wonder M. Renan 
is despondent. The more his descendants believe as he does the 
less they will have. 

A man whose character was much superior to that of M. Renan 
was the late Professor Clifford, of England. On his dying bed he 
uttered some inexpressibly mournful thoughts, which are strik- 
ingly similar to the testimony of M. Renan. Professor Clifford 
said : 

It cannot be doubted that the theistic idea is a comfort and a solace to those who 
hold it, and that the loss of it is a very painful loss. It cannot be doubted, at 
least by many of us in this generation, who have received it in our childhood, and 
have parted from it since with such searching trouble as only cradle-faiths can cause. 
We have seen the spring sun shine out of an empty heaven to light up a soulless 
earth; we have felt with utter loneliness that the Great Companion is dead. 

The laborers on the Christian side have no such gloom. We may 
die, but the Gospel will live. The more our descendants receive, 
and believe, and live this Gospel we preach the happier they will 
be. We grow cheerful as time goes on and as our departure is at 
hand. Men may live and men may die, but Christianity goes on 
forever. 

Dissensions in the Enemy's Camp. 

Christianity can be no loser from the dissensions in the camp of 
the enemy. Here is a short chapter of the literature of the first 
quarter of the current year. In the January number of The Nine- 
tee?ith Century Mr. Herbert Spencer gave a characteristic article on 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 1 55 

" Religion," in which he traces religion to a primitive belief in ghosts ! 
He caricatures the Christian religion by the following sentence : 
" So too must die out the belief that a Power present in innumera- 
ble worlds throughout infinite space, and who during millions of 
years of the earth's earliest existence needed no honoring by its in- 
habitants, should be seized with a craving for praise ; and having 
created mankind, should be angry with them if they do not per- 
petually tell him how great he is." In the March number of the 
same review appeared an article entitled " The Ghost of Religion." 
It is from the pen of Mr. Frederick Harrison, who is supposed to 
be the leader of Positivism in England. He praises Mr. Spencer's 
article as being the final word of Agnosticism, but strongly avers 
that " the coming religion " of the agnostic evolutionist is just 
" no religion at all ;" it is merely the ghost of religion. Here are 
examples of the way in which Positivism buffets Agnosticism : 

In spite of capital letters and the use of theological terms as old as Isaiah or 
Athanasius, Mr. Spencer's Energy has no analogy with God. It is eternal, in- 
finite, and incomprehensible; but still it is not He, but It. It remains always 
energy, force, nothing anthropomorphic ; just as electricity or any thing else that 
we might conceive as the ultimate basis of all the physical forces. None of the 
positive attributes which have ever been predicated of God can be used of this 
energy. Neither goodness, nor wisdom, nor justice, nor consciousness, nor will, 
nor life, can be ascribed even by analogy to this force. . . . For my part I 
prefer Mr. Spencer's old term, the Unknowable ; though I have always thought 
that it would be more philosophical not to assert of the Unknown that it is Un- 
knowable. And indeed I would rather not use the capital letter, but stick liter- 
ally to our evidence, and say frankly " the unknown." Thus viewed, the attempt, 
so to speak, to put a little unction into the Unknowable, is hardly worth the 
philosophical inaccuracy it involves." " Agnosticism is no more religion than 
differentiation or the nebular hypothesis is religion." . . . "A religion which 
gives us nothing in particular to believe, nothing as an object of awe and grati- 
tude, which has no special relations to human duty, is not a religion at all. It 
may be a formula, a generalization, a logical postulate, but it is not a religion. 
The Unknowable has managed to get itself spelt with a capital U ; but Carlyle 
taught us to spell the Everlasting No with capitals also. ... To make a 
religion out of the unknowable is far more extravagant than to make it out of the 
Equator. We know something of the Equator ; it influences seasons, equatorial 
peoples, and geographers not a little, and we all hesitate, as was once said, to 
speak disrespectfully of the Equator. But would it be blasphemy to speak disre- 
spectfully of the Unknowable ?" . . . " In the hour of pain, danger, or death, 
can any one think of the Unknowable, hope any thing of the Unknowable, or find 
any consolation therein ? . . . A mother wrung with agony for the loss of her 
child, or the wife crushed by the death of her children's father, or the helpless and 
the oppressed, the poor and the needy, men, women, and children, in sorrow, 



156 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

doubt and want, longing for something to comfort them and to guide them — 
something to believe in, to hope for, to love and to worship — they come to our 
philosophers, and they say : ' Your men of science have routed our priests, and 
have silenced our old teachers. What religious faith do you give us in its place ?' 
And the philosopher replies (his full heart bleeding for them), and he says : 
•Think of the Unknowable !' " 

Braver, truer, and more pertinent words could scarcely be ex- 
pected from even the ablest champions of the Christian faith.* 

Reaction Among Infidels. 

In addition to all this among many who have been active mis- 
sionaries of unfaith there is a re-action. Thomas Cooper, while he 
was under the dominion of that faith-in-nothing which begets 
doubt of every thing, while contemplating the condition of annihila- 
tion to which he supposed he was to be reduced, wrote these 
lines : 

" Farewell, grand sun ! How my weak heart revolts 
At that appalling thought — that my last look 
At thy great light must come ! O, I could brook 
The dungeon, though eterne ! the priests' own hell, 

Aye, or a thousand hells, in thought, unshook, 
Rather than Nothingness ! And yet the knell* 
I fear, is near that sounds — to Consciousness farewell !" 

Rev. W. Harrison tells us that " the gracious hand that saved the 
sinking disciples has been stretched forth to Mr. Cooper, and from 
the deluge of darkness and mental agony he has been saved by the 
same redeeming and loving power." The same writer is the 
authority for the statement that a London journal asserts that " of 
twenty infidel lecturers and writers who have been prominent in 
the last thirty years sixteen have abandoned their infidelity and 
openly professed their faith in Christ and their joy in his salvation." 

M. Hegard, Professor of Philosophy in the University of Copen- 
hagen, has until recently been the apostle of atheism in his country. 
He has, says the Setneur Vaudois, just published a second edition of 
one of his works, and this is what he says in the introduction : 
" The experiences of life, its sufferings and griefs, have shaken my 



* Since the delivery of this address I have read Mr. Herbert Spencer's reply to Mr. Harrison. 
It is a searching paper, pointing out the absurdities of Positivism as Mr. Harrison has pointed 
out the absurdities of Agnosticism. Thus rejecters of Christ reject one another. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 157 

soul, and have broken the foundation upon which I formerly thought 
I could build. Full of faith in the sufficiency of science, I thought 
to have found in it a sure refuge from all the contingencies of life. 
This illusion is vanished ; when the tempest came which plunged me 
in sorrow, the moorings, the cable of science, broke like thread. Then 
I seized upon that help which many before me have laid hold of. I 
sought and found peace in God, Since then I have not abandoned 
science, but I have assigned to it another place in my life." 

Surely in view of all these facts and considerations we may thank 
God and take courage. 

Treatment of Opponents. 

And we are encouraged to do that which it is plainly the duty of 
educated Christians to do, namely, to cultivate the spirit of mag- 
nanimity toward those who oppose the truths which seem to us 
not only precious but permanent. 

Have the unchristian modern scientists been always treated 
wisely ? We do not say kindly, or even fairly. They are men of 
some power. No Christian man can hold them in contempt. They 
are not insignificant forces in the world of thought. Men that can 
have attracted so much attention must be luminous. Men that can 
excite so much mental activity in so many quarters must be forci- 
cle, however mistaken. 

They have broached theories, stated propositions, promulgated 
dogmas which may prove to- have insufficient basis in true science. 
Their systems may seem to be antagonistic to the systems com- 
monly received among people called Christians. They may not 
always have treated Christians with knightly courtesy. In their 
zeal for the defense of their favorite theories they may have said 
many imprudent, perhaps many wrong things. Those who are 
acknowledged as Christian thinkers may regard their systems false, 
their methods bad, their influence injurious. If so, this state of 
affairs devolves upon Christian thinkers the important work of 
diminishing their influence by demonstrating the fallacy of their 
writings and speeches. No good ever came of reviling. Making 
faces at one another is the poor revenge of silly children. What- 
ever can be known to be false can be proved to be false. 



i 5 8 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

Moreover, the writings of these gentlemen, if injurious, must be 
injurious to two classes of people — those who desire to reject the 
truth, or those who, sincerely desiring to believe the truth, are 
captivated by the fallacious arguments brilliantly made in favor of 
error. It is well known that a man can be just as sincere on the 
wrong side as on the right side of a proposition, which, after all, 
must be established or destroyed not by the sincerity of advocate 
or opponent, but by logical processes. These very gentlemen may 
have been just as sincere in blinding themselves with their philoso- 
phy, falsely so-called, as a portion of their readers are in being so 
blinded. This does not save them from the injury which always 
comes of believing the false to be the true ; but it ought to save 
them from the allegation of insincerity. They are men who hold 
good positions in society, not by force of wealth or rank, but of 
intellect and character. Apart from what is wrong in their writ- 
ings some of them are said to be estimable men. It really does no 
good to cast slurs upon them. If at any time they have behaved 
unfairly in maintaining what we think to be wrong, that certainly 
can never justify us in behaving unfairly toward them in striving to 
establish the right. 

The more we give importance to the personal part of the con- 
troversy the more we detract from the importance of the argu- 
mentative portion. It is a difference of opinion. They are possi- 
bly right — we are quite sure that they are wrong. We are possibly 
wrong — we are quite sure that we are right. It is a question which, 
after all, must be settled by argument. If they are right they will 
be able finally to establish it, though we call them and their theo- 
ries by all sorts of nicknames. If they are wrong we shall over- 
throw them, no matter what may be the epithets they apply to us ; 
but if they are wrong and we are right, all treatment of them and 
of their writings which is contrary to Christian courtesy will post- 
pone the day of the triumph of truth. Let us allow them every 
thing they can fairly claim of genius, learning, laboriousness, and 
even love of truth. Our attacks upon their sophistry will have 
more force from this generous treatment of their good qualities. 

Something might be gained also to what we think the Christian 
side if when a new theory is advanced we could calmly wait to see 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



159 



whether it can put in any good show of probability, and then take 
the ground that, supposing this new theory established, there 
would be nothing therein to disturb the peace of simple-hearted 
Christian people ; that, religion being a lively feeling of the rela- 
tionship existing between the individual soul and God, it is wholly 
unaffected by the state of scientific opinion in any age of the world ; 
that religion is always the same and science is always changing. 

We may take the same ground in regard to the Bible. That 
which it presents us of the character and actions of God is such as 
only he can tell of himself, and is what science never discovered or 
could discover. It does not seem wise to take for granted that 
every new scientific theory has necessarily a tendency to upset our 
faith. It would be just as weak as to sink into spasms of fear lest the 
ocean is to be dried up because a new fish had been found in the 
sea. If our religion be true, it is the grandest and most enduring 
truth. If any new thing is proved scientifically, so far as it can be 
to have any connection with religion, it will be demonstrated to be 
shown in harmony therewith. No matter how we came, we came from 
God. No matter through how many changes the originally created 
Adam may have been carried before it ripened into us, Christian 
people can turn to one another and say, " Beloved, now are we the 
sons of God." Whether it be by the single step of creation, or the 
double step of creation and redemption, or the three steps of origi- 
nal creation, intermediate evolution, and final redemption, " Now 
are we the sons of God." 

It is at least prudent to concede that these gentlemen may 
have no intentions adverse to Christianity, unless they distinctly 
affirm their opposition. They make certain observations which 
give them certain results. They reason upon these in certain ways 
which lead them to certain conclusions. A Christian stands by and 
says : " Why, that cannot be so, because that would be contrary to 
Christianity." The instant reply is : " We cannot help that. We 
must speak out what we take to be truth. If the truth be contrary 
to Christianity, so much the worse for Christianity." Whereas, 
what the scientist claims to be an established truth may as yet be only 
a suggested hypothesis : or, if it turn out to be true, the objector's 
notion of Christianity may be false. A man ought to have enough 



160 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

confidence in his religion to have patience. The Christian religion 
is true or false. If false, we ought all to abandon it ; if true, it will 
outride all errors. By a short-sighted zeal of professed Christians 
men may be driven into antagonism to Christianity who may have 
had no original disposition that way. May it not be wiser to adopt 
the plan of taking all the grist that comes through the mill of 
science and striving as far as we can to make this meal up into the 
bread of religion ? 

This course would certainly leave to Christian philosophers and 
scientists their whole power for the scientific and philosophic refuta- 
tion of all the errors propagated on the other side and for the 
establishment of the truth. 

Blatant Anti-Christians. 

But, while we should inculcate and exemplify this spirit toward 
the better class of the opponents of our faith, all Christians should 
labor to set before the masses of the people, in conversation and 
by promoting appropriate lectures, and by the constant reproduc- 
tion of those lectures in local journals, of the facts which annihilate 
the boast of the blatant anti-Christians, the men who lead away 
simple-hearted people, young and old, by appeals to their passions 
or their prejudices. 

A Misrepresentation. 

One of the boasts of these unscrupulous men is that all the 
scientists of the age are infidels, and that all science is antagonistic 
to Christianity. A falsehood may be dinned into the ears of people 
until it will come to be accepted as the truth, and there are young 
persons in Great Britain and America to-day who are so constantly 
in the circle of error and away from enlightenment that it would sur- 
prise them to learn that there is a single man entitled to the name of 
scientist who is openly or secretly a Christian. Now the truth is 
that an anti Christian is an exception in the ranks of scientific men ; 
almost all the eminent scientists of the day being devout believers 
in the religion of Jesus Christ. Let vague and loose statements be 
brought to the test of facts. Ask for a list of the men who are 
accounted scientists by scientists. Take the men so named, and count, 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. X 6 T 

or weigh, or measure them, and see what proportion are professed 
rejecters of religion- Read this list to the people who are misled 
and see how it will open their eyes. How, then, did this idea find 
place ? The explanation is not far to seek. No good man boasts 
of being a religionist. He does not flaunt his profession in the 
eyes of his fellow-men. His co-religionists do not ordinarily 
trumpet his belief. But if a man become known to the community 
and seem to commit himself against religion he is glorified, and 
made a hero, and quoted. It is so in every department of society. 
In mercantile circles the suspension of one firm or the breaking of 
one bank will create more noise in a week than the regular pros- 
perous working of a thousand banks and ten thousand merchants 
will make in a year. There are a million of men in the United 
States who have never committed felony of any sort and whose 
names have never appeared in any newspaper. They are the good 
unknown. Every wretch who has taken a human life has had his 
name paraded to the eyes of all the readers, old or young, through- 
out the length and breadth of the land. Reading the daily papers, 
and taking general and superficial impressions, one might thought- 
lessly reach the conclusion that the most of the population of 
the land is engaged in petit or grand larceny, swindling or 
robbery, burglary or arson, seduction or adultery, homicide or 
murder in the first degree. But we know that this is not true. 
Nor is it true that because a few noisy blasphemers are claim- 
ing the scientists on their side therefore those gentlemen are 
opposed to religion. 

Scientists at Prayer. 

At the session of the American Association for the Advance- 
ment of Science, held at Minneapolis in 1883, according to a custom 
which has been in favor for years, a prayer-meeting was held on Sun- 
day afternoon, which was attended by a large number of the members 
of the Association, many of whom took part in the services. At 
that meeting the leader remarked that the earliest teaching of litera- 
ture or science imposed and taught the worship of God as Creator 
and Preserver. He then read the 19th and 43d Psalms as the 

lesson of the hour, Principal J. W. Dawson of McGill College, 
11 



1 62 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

Montreal, Canada, followed with remarks. Said he : " Men of 
science are not antagonistic to true religion ; they are seeking truth. 
Paul certainly, and also Luke, among the apostles, should be ranked 
among the scientists of their day. There is no incongruity between 
the pursuit of truth in science and a devout and god-fearing spirit." 
Professor Young, of Princeton (who is an honored member of the 
American Institute of Christian Philosophy), who was President of 
the Association for the year, followed with similar remarks, declar- 
ing that this was not an irreligious association, but one that realized 
its responsibility to the Maker of all, and reverently added : " We 
need a stronger and more living faith." Dr. Hovey, of Bridgeport, 
Conn., the originator of the Association's prayer-meeting, said : 
" We seek the truth ; seek it earnestly, humbly, yet fearlessly, being 
assured that from these efforts no detriment can come to true re- 
vealed religion." He then referred to the devout spirit of scientists, 
and instanced the first message sent by telegraph ; namely, " What 
hath God wrought ! " and also to the other first one, when the tele- 
graph encircled the world ; to wit, " Glory to God in the highest, on 
earth peace, good will toward men ! " 

It is worth remarking how little that prayer-meeting was noticed 
by the press. It is a better answer to the ridiculous " prayer-test " 
proposition of a few years ago than one half the arguments which 
have been elaborately employed, and yet it was ignored by the 
newsmongers, while the prayer-test was hailed, and heralded, and 
kept before the eyes of all the people. The Christian people every- 
where should see that the facts on our side are reproduced in their 
local journals until their influence is felt every-where. 

How to Reach the People. 

Perhaps my honored fellow-laborers will bear with me and not 
misunderstand me if I touch another topic. Let me introduce it by 
a question. Do we, who deliver addresses and lectures on Christian 
evidence and Christian philosophy, seek with sufficient earnestness 
to render our arguments intelligible to the common people ? After 
one of the lectures in one of our courses in the Broadway Taber- 
nacle, as I walked down the street with a young man of rare abili- 
ties, who had studied in Germany and in the East, he put this to 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 1 63 

me after the following fashion: ''You gentlemen are very earnest, 
but I cannot help contrasting you with the greatest and most fa- 
mous lecturers on physical science. When they come before pop- 
ular audiences they do not descend to clap-trap, but they employ 
the choicest yet clearest language to make what they say not only 
understood by the plainest hearer, but interesting to him. Some of 
your Institute's lecturers do not seem to see the necessity of that. 
The lecture to-night was very able. I believe that I understood 
what the lecturer meant in every sentence, but it was because it was 
in the line of my studies. I do not think that more than one in 
twenty of the persons present felt the force of the argument. It 
was written accurately in the high technicalities of philosophy, but 
it could have been stated in plain language with no loss of force." 

Shortly after this American view of the case there was an English 
presentation of the same idea. The Rev. Henry Footman, in his 
book entitled Reasonable Apprehensions and Reasonable Hints, seemed 
much impressed with the faculty possessed by the leaders in the 
Hall of Science in London for presenting the agnostic philosophy 
of Spencer and Mill, and the so-called " higher criticism " of Ger- 
many, in such a form that it is not only intelligible but attractive to 
the uncultivated mass of the East End. This is worth pondering. 
Fas ab hoste doceri* The American Institute must at its monthly 
meetings and in its summer schools and in its publications afford 
the opportunity for the utterance of the most profound researches 
in science and philosophy by the ablest thinkers in Christendom. 
That will be considered by many as its first function. But, beyond 
that, can we not induce our strongest men, the men whose ability 
and eminence are universally acknowledged, with their mastery of 
the subject, to go before the people, the busy people who have no 
time for high study, and present to them the deepest truth in the 
plainest words, and make that truth still plainer and more winsome 
by illustrations captivating to their fancies ? If, for the sake of their 
scientific hypotheses, the gentlemen of the physical science depart- 
ment can do this, cannot our great and gifted men, for Christ's sake 
and the truth's, carry the highest thoughts to the lowliest minds in 
such ways as shall make the angel's visit welcome to the peasant's 
hovel? There seems to be a rich field open to some great man, who 



164 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

is great enough to be as great in a valley as on a mount, who shall 
be able to speak so that all the masters of all the schools shall be 
bound by the spell of his power and learning and yet feel that it is 
not a condescension, but an honor, to give the truth to children and 
child-like men ; who shall be able at once to lead the music of the 
choirs invisible and to show shepherds how to find the Redeemer. 

" The Liberty of Prophesying." 

But, in this day when such large claims are made for " the liberty 
of prophesying," it may be well to give heed to some of the condi- 
tions and limits of this liberty. 

Studious men have fancies, whims, suggestive ideas perpetually 
floating through their brains. These will ordinarily relate to the 
subjects of their studies. Faraday, one of the most practical of sci- 
entists, although he was never misled by fantasies, found his brain 
teeming with them. Those notions that seem most consistent with 
the knowledge already attained, or to have some possibility of being, 
at least, essential to the circle of settled science, are to be held a 
moment that the thinker may examine them, in order to ascertain 
whether it is worth while to examine them still further, with a view 
to forming an opinion. Perhaps one of each hundred may be found 
worthy this honor. 

But opinions are one thing and beliefs another. A fair, earnest, 
industrious thinker, who is patient withal, and who is too self-loving 
to be self-deceptive, will be very cautious how many of his opinions 
he allows to ascend to the plane of belief. He is a very prosperous 
worker in the mine of thought who finds one in each score of his 
opinions worth the name of a belief; and he is an opulent teacher 
who knows, or is entirely sure, that one in each dozen of his beliefs 
is really and truly a doctrine. 

There never was a time when teachers of science and religion 
were more called to keep these distinctions in view than the present. 
An opinion is not a hypothesis, and a hypothesis is not a theory, and 
a theory is not a doctrine in any department of science, physical or 
mental. It requires more than one opinion to make a hypothesis. 
Before it can become the accepted theory a hypothesis must be 
worked on so long that no other hypothesis on the subject can be 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 1 65 

accepted ; and a hypothesis may be worked until it produce a 
theory which is destructive of the parent hypothesis. A theory 
must come into general acceptance among teachers in the depart- 
ment to which it belongs before it can be promulgated as a doc- 
trine. The hypothesis has no other foundation than " suppose." 
It says, " Suppose A were B, what could C be?" It is always 
answered by another " suppose." Thus : " Suppose A were not B, 
what is C then ? " Or, " Suppose A were Z, what then ? " But 
theory cannot be so easily set aside. It must be shown to be 
unreasonable or defective in that it does not meet the facts that are 
known. The hypothesis is the vessel which holds the pearls of 
the facts ; the theory the string on which they are strung. 

Doctrine is something higher, more important, and more solemn. 
It is what a man must teach if he teach at all. In science a man 
may or may not teach ; it is a matter of choice. But when he does 
teach he must remember that just as great a proportion of people 
must take their scientific teaching on authority, without investigation, 
as must take their religious teaching. So he is bound to tell them 
when he is enunciating an opinion, when a hypothesis, when a 
theory, and when a doctrine. 

The public teacher who expects to win the reputation of trust- 
worthiness in the department of science must be very careful how 
he advances sudden suggestions or even well-weighed thoughts as 
science. He may discuss them esoterically, with other scientific 
teachers, until satisfied that they are opinions worth uttering to the 
public or to the classes committed to his charge. Even when so 
satisfied he must be very careful to call attention to the fact that he 
is only expressing his opinion, and is not teaching science. He may 
so speak his opinions as opinions, and he may set forth hypotheses 
as hypotheses, and theories as theories, but he must be careful not 
to insist upon these as settled doctrines of the Scientific Catholic 

Church. 

Philosophical Cant. 

Perhaps, also, we cannot warn one another too often of the danger 
of falling into "cant." In philosophy and in science it is just as 
easy to acquire the habit of using words which have been emptied 
of their meaning as it is in religion. 



1 66 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

Into our modern philosophical discussions has come the word 
" unthinkable." It is of such frequent use that it might be well to 
ask those who so often take refuge under it as a shield when they 
are attacked, and so often hurl it as a javelin against any statement 
they oppose, what they mean by it. Do they mean " inconceivable ? " 
But "conceivability " is not held by metaphysicians as a criterion of 
any truth which can be proved, and there are many things accepted 
by all classes of thinkers as true which are not conceivable. The 
expansion of space infinitely is inconceivable. So an interminable 
series, so the approach of asymptotes. Is there absolute knowledge 
of any kind that is " thinkable " in the sense of being "conceivable?" 

How could any proposition be declared unthinkable unless it had 
been thought somehow? The agreement or disagreement of the 
terms of a proposition may be declared axiomatic, or demonstrable, 
or probable, or possible, or impossible, or absurd, but there must 
first have been thought of the meaning of the terms, and thought 
of the statement of the agreement or disagreement of the terms ; 
but nothing can be declared in this sense " unthinkable " until after it 
has been thought — a process which would prove it not unthinkable. 

But, in regard to any proposition, suppose that two men state, the 
one that to him it is thinkable, and the other that to him it is un- 
thinkable ; which is to decide, or who is to decide? A might say to 
B that B could " think " it if he would, and the retort of B might be 
that A was wholly mistaken, and that, assuming his truthfulness, he 
only thought that he thought it. 

Can any man go further than to say that he is not capable of 
" thinking " it? But suppose a million of men, or many millions, 
should asseverate that a proposition was unthinkable to them, that 
would not prove it unthinkable absolutely; nor would it be proved, 
so long as there existed a single intelligent personality who had not 
been heard from on that subject. Nor would the unanimity of the 
race now existing establish the unthinkability of any proposition. 
To Lucretius it would have been (< unthinkable," in the sense in 
which the word seems to be often used, if in objection to his cor- 
puscular theory he had been told that there is no " up," and conse- 
quently no " down," in the material universe. With our cosmical 
ideas the absence of " up " and " down " is very plain. If he had 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 1 6/ 

heard the statement, and had said " that is unthinkable," he could 
only have meant that it seemed impossible for him to co-ordinate it 
with his conception of the universe; and so it was. After all, is not 
that what is really meant by this expression, as it is now generally 
used ? If that be all, why is it not so stated ? Is it not arrogance 
to assume that any man knows what can and what cannot be 
thought? When any man says of any idea that it is unthinkable he 
virtually asserts that his intellect is the measure of all human capa- 
bility. Those who are fond of the phrase are probably so per- 
suaded, but if that be true it unfits them for every office of teacher 
of either philosophy or ethics. It sounds like the protest of the 
imbecile or the brag of the bully. 

Then there is the word " unknowable." It is ordinarily employed 
with a capital initial, to represent what would stand for God if the 
writers were compelled to admit that there is such a thing or being 
as God in the universe. Manifestly this is what they do not wish to 
do. The connections in which the word occurs show to those who 
look below the lines the secret desire which is embodied in a 
masked argument to prove that there is no personal Creator of the 
universe. The intimation is that we can never know whether there 
be such a God or not, and therefore, for all practical purposes of 
science and philosophy, men may as well go on the supposition that 
there is no God. This sly process finds some acceptance made for 
itself in the universal consciousness of mankind of inability to com- 
prehend God. But in this sense every particle of matter is as un- 
knowable as God. The nature of matter in its essence was just as 
well known to the first man as to any man, to the untutored bush- 
man as to any professor of science in any university ; and the fact 
that our progress in science and philosophy through the ages has 
brought no man nearer than any other man to a knowledge of the 
nature of matter, while all men have always known the fact of its exist- 
ence, and many men have learned much of its many properties, should 
cause all thinkers to perceive that a denial of the existence of God 
and of our capabilities to know his attributes because in his essence 
he is unknowable, and so make one w r ord, which is true of one con- 
cept and false of two others, stand for all, raises prima facie evidence 
of philosophical unfairness. . . . 



l6S CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

Final Words. 

It is not necessary, I trust, to urge members of the Institute to 
make efforts for its advancement. There are so many ways in which 
each can help the officers, who are doing so much unpaid work 
for which every member is as much responsible as any officer. 
Printing, postage, clerk hire, lectures, must be paid for. The 
officers can go no further than the funds justify. Let each mem- 
ber this year secure just one other member for the Institute and 
one subscriber to Christian Thought, and, while there is no dis- 
couragement at this anniversary, there will be a great exhilaration 
at the next. 

Personally allow me to thank my brother officers for their kind 
forbearance with me and for their generous expressions of confidence 
during the year which has closed, and to renew my solicitation that 
they endeavor to procure the services of some gentleman who can 
bring to the presidency abilities and learning which will give greater 
aid to the Institute than — I may say without affectation — I feel that 
mine have done. 



FOURTH ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS. 

[Delivered before the American Institute of Christian Philosophy, at Asbury Park, N J., July 23, 1885.] 

At the close of the first year of the work of the American Insti- 
tute of Christian Philosophy it was thought best that the President 
should deliver an address somewhat in the nature of a general view 
of our field and the work which had been done therein. This has 
been followed through the successive years ; but it seems to me that 
we have reached such a stage of growth that all that is needed in 
that department for publication may be found in the reports of our 
secretary and treasurer. I beg to refer to those documents. To 
adhere to any topic when there is not sufficient matter to justify 
a discussion is not a course to be pursued before such a body 
as this Institute. I am about, therefore, to presume upon the 
kindness of the Institute in allowing me to substitute for such a 
review of Christian effort the treatment of topics, in our line of 
thought, to which I have given some consideration during the past 
year. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. ^9 

The Case of Galileo. 

The opening address which I had the honor to make at our first 
Summer School, on the 12th of July, 1881, contained these sen- 
tences: "It was not religion which brought Galileo to his humiliat- 
ing- retraction, about which we hear so much declamation; it was 
1 the Church.' But why should writers of the history of science 
so frequently conceal the fact that 'the Church' was instigated 
thereunto, not by religious people, but scientific men — by Gal- 
ileo's collaborateurs? It was the jealousy of the scientists which 
made use of the bigotry of the churchmen to degrade a rival in 
science." 

The Rev. Mr. Engstrom, Secretary of the Christian Evidence So- 
ciety, London, wrote me that while he was reading that passage in 
the address one of the lecturers employed by the Society entered 
the office, and in talking about his work said that one of the most 
difficult things he found to meet was the case of Galileo, continually 
presented by the opponents of Christianity. I was asked by Mr. 
Engstrom to furnish the proof of the statement made in my ad- 
dress. This led me to examine the case and to furnish what seems 
to be the true story of Galileo. 

Before feeling quite safe in using this stale story to show that the 
religious spirit is intolerant of truths established by science it might 
be freshened by a little examination of these three points ; namely, 
what did really happen to Galileo ; and on whom the responsibility 
rests ; and, what it all proves. 

It is not necessary to recite the history of Galileo, the details of 
which can be found in any good encyclopedia. It is sufficient to 
recall the facts that he lived in Italy during the last third of the six- 
teenth century and the first third of the seventeenth, and that he 
made a number of very important discoveries which tended to form 
a science of dynamics, and some astronomical discoveries which 
hastened the general acceptance of the Copernican system. He was 
a man of extraordinary genius, and would probably have excelled in 
any department of study. He early ranked with the most skillful 
professors of music, and that art at one time seemed about to be his 
calling. But he loved painting, and one of the most distinguished 
painters of his day confessed that he owed to Galileo's instruction 



iyo 



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his success as an artist. He was so eloquent that it was expected he 
would enrich literature. An incident turned his attention to geom- 
etry. Then his great genius for mathematics showed itself, and he 
began those experiments and publications which have given him his 
lasting fame. Before he was twenty-five years of age he was Mathe- 
matical Lecturer in the University of Pisa. At twenty-seven )^ears 
of age he was Professor of Mathematics in the University of Padua, 
where he continued for eighteen years in the enjoyment of a com- 
petent salary and leisure for scientific pursuits. From this post he 
was called to a professorship in Florence at a more liberal salary, 
and was greatly honored. Cardinal Bellarmino, the most learned 
and influential member of the Sacred College at Rome, was his 
warm personal friend; a still warmer friend was Cardinal Maffeo- 
Barberini, who, from that same College, ascended the pontifical 
throne in 1623, with the title Urban VIII. This is the pope who is 
reported to have said (to Cardinal Hohenzollern) that the propaga- 
tion of the heliocentric theory, which necessarily involved the earth's 
motion, had not been condemned as heretical, nor could be, but 
could only be considered as rash. 

It is to be remembered that Galileo had not only a great grasp of 
understanding, but great brilliancy of imagination and splendor of 
speech. He treated the dry details of science with such eloquence 
that his class at Padua grew until the university was compelled to 
furnish him a hall which would contain two thousand hearers. His 
lectures were not at all on theological, but scientific subjects. He 
used his fiery eloquence in burning sarcasm on his scientific oppo- 
nents. Hence his troubles. When he was twenty-five years old he 
began, and for two years continued, the experiments on which 
modern dynamical science may be said mainly to rest. There was 
nothing in those teachings that could be fancied to have any theo- 
logical bearing ; but when scientific opponents saw him from the 
tower of Pisa giving ocular demonstration of the falsity of the Peri- 
patetic teachings, and heard him ridiculing the Aristotelians with 
his biting rhetoric, those gentlemen of the adverse scientific school 
conceived a hatred for Galileo which followed him through his long 
career. They could not answer his arguments, but they could infuse 
discomfort into his life, and they would have killed him early if he 



FOR E VER Y FIRESIDE. 1 7 1 

had not had the protection of such churchmen as Bellarmino and 
Urban VIII. 

His first trouble originated in demonstrating the falsity of the 
theory that " heavy bodies fall with velocities proportional to their 
weights." Galileo had a talent for exciting the hatred of those whose 
scientific opinions he opposed. He not only lacked tact, but even 
ordinary prudence. To the aid of the Aristotelian foes he raised an 
auxiliary by the manner in which he condemned a certain machine 
which had been invented by a son of Cosmo. He thus alienated the 
favor of the archducal court. His troubles, we see, arose from a sci- 
entific hypothesis and an opinion of a machine — neither of which 
could wound religious or even ecclesiastical susceptibilities. 

What did his enemies succeed in doing? They watched Galileo 
with sleepless vigilance. They knew that his enthusiastic mainte- 
nance of any theory he held would give them some hold upon him. 
Already the Copernican theory, as then understood, seemed, alike 
to the ignorant and the learned, as being contradicted by some 
passages in the Holy Scriptures, as then understood. In certain 
expositions of the relations of physical science to the Holy Script- 
ures he very unwisely strove to propitiate the ecclesiastics who were 
indifferent to science, and to confound his scientific opponents who 
were ecclesiastics by striving to confirm a new scientific theory by 
passages out of the old Bible. His scientific opponents, always on 
the alert, seized the pretext. The pulpits thundered. The Inquisi- 
tion was invoked. When the Dominican, Niccola Lorini, denounced 
Galileo to the congregation of the Holy Office it seems to have 
been mainly on the ground that he " spoke with little respect of 
Aristotle." A systematic persecution was organized and prosecuted. 
With what result? Galileo had voluntarily appeared before the 
Sacred College, expecting to convince them of the truth of his 
teachings. He failed. The proposition that the sun is the center of 
the system was declared by the consulting theologians to be "absurd 
in philosophy, and formally heretical, because expressly contrary to 
Holy Scripture." The proposition that the earth moved around the 
sun was declared to be "open to the same censure in philosophy, and 
at least erroneous as to faith." * 

* " The Roman College was a regular tribunal, scientific as well as theological." (M. Mezieres.) 



172 



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Galileo was admonished not to teach the condemned doctrine. 
He consented. He returned to his home unhurt and, it is said, in 
good spirits. He had not abjured. There had been no penalty im- 
posed. His enemies had circulated reports involving those two cal- 
umnies which Galileo refuted by producing the written certificate of 
Cardinal Bellarmino that the statements were untrue. 

It was five years after this that Galileo visited his friend Maffeo 
Barberini, who in the interval had reached the papal throne. With 
the pop'e the astronomer had long and friendly interviews. On his 
return he continued his studies for years. In 1632 he published a 
book which was received with highest praise all over Europe on ac- 
count of the ability of its matter and the elegance of its style. It 
was in the form of a dialogue, in which there were three interloc- 
utors — one a teacher of the new astronomical doctrines, one an in- 
telligent listener, and the third a good-natured but stupid objector. 
In this last character Galileo made occasion to ridicule his Peripa- 
tetic opponents. Perhaps if that had been omitted no specially ad- 
verse notice would have been taken of the book, the publication of 
which certainly was a violation of Galileo's promise to conform to 
the edict of the Sacred College made sixteen years before. But he 
managed so to incense his philosophic and scientific opponents that 
they lost little time in renewing the attack. 

The result was that the book was prohibited. The mind of the 
pope was stirred against Galileo, whose course he regarded as un- 
grateful to himself, seeing that he had shown him such personal 
consideration. It was this more than any theological animus that 
prompted Urban VIII. to cite Galileo to Rome. Urban did not re- 
ject the heliocentric theory of astronomy, but he had his susceptibili- 
ties as pope, and he regarded the stirring up of strife by Galileo as 
a personal offense. Well, finally to Rome Galileo went. There 
seemed to be no cruel urgency. He was cited in October, 1632, but 
did not go until February, 1633. He was not thrown into prison. 
He remained two months in the palace of the Tuscan embassador, 
who was his warm personal friend, his ardent partisan on the scien- 
tific side. After that he was detained eighteen days in the palace of 
the Inquisition. Then he returned to the friendly hospitality of the 
palace of the Tuscan embassador. The charge was that he had pub- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 1 73 

lished matter contrary to the edict of the Inquisition in 1616. He 
defended himself by disavowing on oath his belief in the Copernican 
theory since its condemnation by the Congregation of the Index, 
and by avowing that his intentions in all his publications were good 
and such as became a true Catholic. He even offered to write another 
dialogue to disprove the Copernican theory. On the 21st of June he 
received his sentence, which was, that, being "violently suspected of 
heresy," he should be liable to incarceration at the pleasure of the 
tribunal. 

Was he incarcerated ? No. Did he recite any abjuration while 
kneeling, and then spring from his knees and stamp the ground and 
exclaim "E pur se mnove ! " t No ; that powerful and affecting little 
story does not seem to have been invented until Galileo had been 
dead nearly a century and a half. What punishment was assigned 
him by the judges? That for the space of three years he should 
daily repeat the seven penitential psalms! Was that awful sentence 
ever executed ? No. It was never ratified by the pope, whose 
wounded sensibilities seemed to have been so far alleviated that he 
gave Galileo a picture and settled a pension on his son. Then the 
astronomer was transferred to the palace of the Archbishop of 
Sienna, in whose superb garden he promenaded daily, writing cheer- 
ful and even jocose letters and notes to his friends. It is not in this 
way that an old man who had been tortured would jest, says M. Biot, 
who was convinced that it was not scientific truth but personal ani- 
mosities which led to Galileo's troubles. 

This is the outcome of the affair of Galileo. This is all the ene- 
mies of either the Church of Rome or of Christianity have had for 
the pages of vituperation which they have concocted against religion. 
This is all that can be shown historically. All the rest is invention. 
A calm view of this history shows several things. Reared in the 
bosom of the Roman Catholic Church three hundred years ago, and 
dying in the faith and communion in which he was brought up — a 
faith and communion ordinarily supposed to be the least tolerant of 
free thought and most exacting of submission to authority — Galileo 
found space to cultivate exact science and to promulgate new scien- 
tific doctrines. He came when the authority of Aristotle, who was 
a pagan, and whose philosophy was empirical, had ruled human 



174 



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thought for more than a thousand years. He came when, in Italy, 
Rome ruled in all matters, civil, religious, literary, philosophical, and 
social. There was nothing outside the Church, because every thing 
was inside. Every sinner as well as every saint was a Catholic. If 
any controversy rose on any subject both opponents were church- 
men, whether they were scullions or scholars, cartmen or cardinals. 

Galileo had the sagacity to see the truth of the new theory and 
the ability to bring the results of profound and vigorous thought to 
its support. He found churchmen to help him and churchmen to 
oppose him. If the Roman Catholic Church of his age must be 
charged with the fact that some of its theologians opposed the new 
science it must be credited with the other fact that some of its 
theologians maintained it. The edict against the works of Coper- 
nicus (Be Revolutionibus Orbium Ccelestium) and against Galileo 
(1616) was issued by a college or congregation whose function was 
merely disciplinary. The Church of Rome is not to be held re- 
sponsible for that, because, in the first place, it was not confirmed 
by the reigning pope (Paul V.), and in the next place it was disap- 
proved by his successor, and finally it was repealed in the following 
century by the Church under Benedict XIV. The condemnation of 
Galileo, seventeen years later, was merely a paper signed by seven 
cardinals and not ratified by the pope, Urban VIII., who was op- 
posed to the prohibitory decree and seems to have held to the new 
doctrine. His heat against Galileo arose from pride wounded by 
ingratitude. It was followed by no personal pains and penalties 
when appeased by Galileo's deceitful recantation. It must not be 
forgotten that Galileo received his tuition as a pupil in the schools 
of the Church, and that he held places of honor and emolument, as 
professor and otherwise, in universities of the Church, from which 
he was never ejected. 

Suppose there were an established Church of America in this last 
quarter of the nineteenth century, and suppose every body belonged 
to it, and that among the scholars that belonged to it there arose a 
difference on any question — say the question of evolution ; and sup- 
pose some of the evolutionists, being narrow and uncharitable Chris- 
tians, but good American churchmen, should be in position to make 
some anti-evolutionist, who also was a good churchman, although not 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 175 

strictly moral, feel that he could enjoy life more by verbally agreeing 
to the doctrine of evolution while he went on with his work of over- 
throwing the doctrine, being helped therein by other churchmen — 
in such a case would it not be very unjudicial, to say the least, to 
lay the narrow and persecuting spirit of the evolutionist at the door 
of the American Church ? Let us go further and suppose that the 
authorities of this imagined American Church had always burned 
any man who advanced a new scientific thought, and burned his 
wife, his children, his horse, his ox, his ass, and ail that was his— 
what would that prove ? Simply that this Church had acted in a 
way contrary to the spirit and teaching of Christ, and that the se- 
verest judge of such a Church would be the founder of Christianity. 

But no such thing appears in the case of the Church of Rome and 
Galileo. His life was only another illustration of the general law of 
inertia which pervades mind as it does matter, showing that any 
new motion requires force for its initiation and will meet resistance 
in its progress. Historically the case in hand was not the case of 
the Church of Rome versus Galileo, but was the case of the Aristo- 
telians versus a new scientist, in which the defendant was at some 
cost to defeat the plaintiff, and in which the plaintiff was finally 
" thrown out of court." 

It may break the unity of this address, but it certainly will in- 
crease its variety, to present another topic. The topic is : 

The Uses of Scientific Studies to the Preacher. 

Before materials are selected it is important to have a clear idea 
of what is to be built. Before discussing the value to the preacher 
of any particular kind of study it seems proper to make for our- 
selves a clear idea of what the real functions of a Christian 
preacher are. 

Perhaps we shall agree upon this : The office of a preacher is to 
set before his hearers, in such ways as shall be persuasive of their 
authoritative truth, the doctrines of the Holy Scriptures, so that 
those doctrines shall become to his hearers a sure basis of spiritual 
experience and moral living. In order to do this in a truly manly 
and efficient way the preacher must have, for himself, a profound 
conviction of the truth and value of those doctrines. That presup- 



176 



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poses a knowledge of those doctrines. But knowledge is the per- 
suasion of the truth of any proposition upon proper evidence. The 
ordinary Christian may be happy and useful in the belief of many a 
truth which he cannot teach. He may be a blessed disciple without 
being a useful apostle. But the preacher is sent forth to " disciple 
all nations." It is not sufficient that he has the conscious experi- 
ence of being able to see the glory of God shining in the face of 
Jesus ; but he must be able to turn the eyes of his fellow-men to- 
ward that glory, so that they may partake of the splendid vision. 

Science is knowledge systematized. Nothing can be claimed as 
science which is not known. Any one smallest fact in the universe 
can be as well known as any number of the most important truths. 
But science has no field until there exists an amount of knowledge 
sufficient to be made into a system. The apostles knew the fact of 
the resurrection of their Lord, but that most important fact could 
not make a Christian theology. The earliest man acquired in the 
first week of his existence the knowledge of several of the most im- 
portant facts in the stellar universe, but it was centuries before the 
world had any thing that could be called astronomy. The doctrines 
of the Christian system are imbedded in the New Testament as the 
doctrines of geology are imbedded in the rocks. 

Men may till the land and sail the waters sufficiently for the 
ordinary purposes of life without geological or astronomical knowl- 
edge in themselves personally ; but no man can teach geology or 
astronomy without scientific knowledge. The preacher-teacher must 
have such knowledge of what is actually taught in the Gospel as 
will enable him to set forth the grounds of his persuasion of the 
truth to his fellow-men. It is sufficient that they be religious, but 
he must be both religious and theological ; and theology is a 
science. 

Moreover, in order to be efficient and largely useful to his people, 
the preacher must have a conviction that the doctrines of the Gos- 
pel which he has learned are superior to all other doctrines as a 
basis for religious experience and ethical conduct. To secure that 
he must make some comparison of those doctrines with the doc- 
trines set forth in other systems. That involves a study of com- 
parative theology. Just in the measure in which a preacher has 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 1 77 

suspicion that the truth, which he preaches is not the paramount 
and indispensable truth, in that proportion is his earnestness cooled 
and his power diminished. His influence over his fellow-men shrinks 
as his earnestness abates, because the most illiterate can appreciate 
earnestness where they cannot comprehend knowledge. They take 
it for granted that when a man undertakes to teach what is neces- 
sary for eternal salvation he has himself examined the grounds and 
felt the power of the doctrines he teaches. But if earnestness be 
lacking they jump to the conclusion that they were mistaken; that 
the man has not any profound conviction of the paramount value of 
what he teaches, and that the teaching which is merely perfunctory 
and professional cannot be of infinite importance. 

Now, in an age in which every class of society — men, women, and 
children — are infected with a desire to know more or less of science; 
at a time when even workmen actually know more of the science 
which has a real basis in knowledge, and also of the science which 
is falsely so called, than was known by professional men a hundred 
years ago — there will creep up into the study and into the heart of 
the preacher who knows no science but theology the suspicion 
that there may be in the attainments of other men some knowledge 
which militates against the doctrines he has been preaching. Such 
a suspicion will produce a weakness and may make a blight. To 
prevent this, to keep his mind in the robust healthfullness of an 
unbroken conviction, the preacher must make excursions in the 
fields of science which lie outside theology. 

This is mentioned first as being first in importance; as being 
much more important than all knowledge. The integrity of the 
preacher s own innermost , profoundest conviction that what he preaches 
is unquestionably true is indispensable. He may, with this, be use- 
ful in turning many to righteousness; without this all learn- 
ing, wit, and eloquence tell for nothing. They may make the 
body of preaching, but conviction of truth supplies the soul of 
preaching. 

There may be a vitality which is very feeble. That the preach- 
ing may flame with life the preacher must not only be convinced 
that there are no truths in any department of knowledge compara- 
ble with the truths of the Gospel, but also that no other truths are 
12 



178 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

of any avail for the salvation of men. He cannot remain in perfect 
security that this is the fact if he make no acquisition of the knowl- 
edge which has been attained by others in the several departments 
of science and philosophy. In this day it is impossible to escape 
intimations of intellectual activity if the preacher read at all. 
These must cause him to feel as if he were continually walking 
amid ambushes, if he do not know that there are no truths so im- 
portant as the truths taught in the Gospel, and if he be not pre- 
pared, on suitable occasions and in proper ways, to show this to his 
people, into whose minds there will frequently be injected the sug- 
gestion that this is not the fact. If they discover that the pastor 
has gone over the ground and examined for himself, and still retains 
his conviction that there is nothing to shake faith in gospel doc- 
trines, as a preacher he will be able to throw the whole weight of 
his personality on the right side ; and that personality will be more 
weighty by reason of his large knowledge. 

Studies in what are called the natural sciences are also very useful 
to a preacher in giving him some knowledge of the correlation of 
truths. He is liable to become lop-sided, irregular, and fanatical — 
all ballast and no sails, or all sails and no ballast. There is a power 
in the proportions of truth. There is much weight imparted to a 
man when his acquaintances believe that he has a well-balanced 
mind. Men of that character have done much more for mankind 
than all the brilliant geniuses who have surprised the world. But 
that balance of mind is attained by the habit of regarding the 
truths in the several departments of knowledge not simply in them- 
selves, but in their relations to one another. This cannot be gained 
by the preacher unless he make space for some study in the various 
departments of science. 

The preacher needs not only balance of mind, but also strength 
of intellect. His intellectual limbs, so to speak, must not only be 
proportionate, but also strong. He must engage, every day, not 
only in physical, but also in intellectual, gymnastics. He does well 
to have a side-study, something that will develop his mind by a 
variety of exercises. He must go from the dumb-bells to the 
parallel bars. Supplemental to the studies necessary for the direct 
preparation of his sermons he should have some study which, 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. jyg 

while not directly connected with the work of the pulpit, has spe- 
cial training power, and which also gives results that can be worked 
into sermons. This last, however, is an after-consideration. As he 
is not to be a specialist he should vary here. He has at command 
philology and archaeology and chemistry and geology and astron- 
omy and biology. Here are six departments of science study in 
which develops perception, comparison, judgment, ratiocination. 
He may take a curriculum of six years and be gaining roundness 
and strength for his pulpit-work. If he be a wise man and have in- 
tellectual self-control his hearers will probably not discover which 
year is given to archaeology and which to astronomy; but they will 
perceive that their pastor is growing in power. He will be mani- 
festly gaining strength to grasp the word of God more firmly and 
skill to apply it more effectually. 

That the work of the preacher be effective it is manifest that it 
must be timely. The preaching that " turned the world upside- 
down " in the Roman Empire would have been utterly out of place 
and out of power in the Middle Ages. Nay, the preaching of the 
last century would not take hold of this generation. The preaching 
which is to-.day removing the stone from the sepulcher of dead souls 
could not have been uttered in the days of the Reformation. It 
would have been as great an anachronism as the preaching of 
Tauler and Luther would be in this day, or would have been in the 
second century. It is to be kept distinctly in mind that the 
preacher who discharges his church duties properly can never be- 
come a specialist, and should not aim at being an atithority in any 
department of natural science. Moreover, he is to be regarded as 
having lost sight of the proprieties if he delivers scientific and 
philosophical discourses. The preacher is to " preach the word ; " 
not philosophy, not science, not poetry, not his own pet theories. 
He is to labor to make men understand the meaning of " the 
word." He is to strive to bring it home to the understandings and 
to the hearts of the very men whom he addresses — not of an imag- 
inary audience. There is one Gospel for king and peasant, for phi- 
losopher and school-boy — and but one; yet surely no one would 
endeavor to convert a company of cultivated men by the method 
he would employ to bring a congregation of semi-civilized persons 



l8o CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

to a knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus. A preacher should 
strive to know the environment of his hearers — their mode of living, 
their employment, their pleasures, the extent of their knowledge, 
the character of thoughts which engage their minds, the reading 
which attracts their attention (if they read at all), and the character 
of the teaching which secures their attention when out of the 
church. In our age money-making and science, even more than 
politics, seem to interest the people. The wonderful practical ap- 
plications of science to the production of material wealth have so 
arrested the attention of the people that they listen to all who pro- 
fess to talk even about science. That is very natural. It is so in 
every department. It is the practical application of religion to the 
lives of men, as seen in daily life, which gives the pulpit of this age 
any hearers ; and this it is which interests listeners, even in the 
baldest and stupidest and most erroneous talk about religion. If 
there were no converted people seen during the week there would 
be no hearers or worshipers in chapel or cathedral on Sunday. The 
preacher must know what the world about him is thinking of, in 
order to know how to bring the Gospel down upon their consciences 
with convincing power. 

The fascination of science for the popular mind is very manifest. 
The two books published within the memory of the present writer, 
in the department of religious literature, which have made the most 
sudden, profound, and wide impression have been Chalmers's Astro- 
nomical Lectures and Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual 
World. The fact is stated. We need not stop to account for it in 
the face of the openness of the latter book to current criticism and 
the disappearance of the former from current reading. It must re- 
mind us, however, how greatly men are interested in science as well 
as religion. He who in his teaching can make either minister to the 
other is the most impressive teacher. Devout teachers of science 
have been able to give their hearers great uplifting by a sudden 
flash of religious light on the researches in hand. When the late 
Professor Agassiz opened the scientific course at Penakese Island 
with the simple but solemn statement that before men entered 
upon any great undertaking they should seek the aid of Almighty 
God, and added, " Gentlemen, let us pray," and humbly invoked 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. l8l 

divine guidance, there fell a hush on the assembly such as probably 
no young man there had ever known in his church at home when 
the pastor made the usual invitation to prayer. Once, in a large 
audience, I was listening to a lecture on the sun, by our revered and 
beloved associate, Professor Charles A. Young, of Princeton. We 
were spell-bound as he pushed forward with the rapid but firm 
tread with which he is accustomed to march through a lecture. 
He was giving us facts and generalizations therefrom — phenomena 
and the probable causes of their production. In the preceding lect- 
ures he had made no "moral reflections," nor any allusion to the 
First Cause, so far as I now recollect. All at once a question arose 
as to the cause of the existence of a certain class of facts, when the 
professor dropped his eyes and voice and said simply that he knew 
of no reasonable way to account for it except to refer it to the will 
of the all-wise and all-good Creator. It was just for a moment, and 
then we were caught up and carried forward. But that moment 
was thrilling. It seemed to bow every soul before the Throne. So, 
on the other side, when preachers are inculcating a great religious 
truth taught by revelation in the Bible, it stirs the souls of their 
hearers when they let suddenly upon that Bible truth the light of 
the torch by whose aid men have been accustomed to explore other 
labyrinths. 

The preacher is bound to enrich his preaching by all he can bring 
from every department of knowledge. How can he keep a sound 
conscience and neglect all those treasures which modern science is 
heaping around him ? How can he hope to be a good scribe unless 
he bring out of the treasury the new things as well as the old, to 
the service of the truth? One of the greatest blessings conferred 
by modern science is the abundance of most rich and satisfactory 
illustrations it is constantly affording of Bible truth, as well as the 
light it is shedding on the stability of the foundations of Bible 
evidences. 

Above all things the work of the gospel preacher is to reconcile 
man to God. The aim of infidel teachers is to keep man unrecon- 
ciled to God. These latter do their work by making the impression 
that the results of scientific studies antagonize the Christian faith. 
Just so long as that thought holds its power over the mind of the 



^2 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

hearer he is irreconcilable, and cannot be otherwise. When the an- 
cient call is rung in modern ears, " Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God 
is one God," men must have the solemn and profound conviction of 
the truth that the God of Nature is the God of Grace, and the Cre- 
ator of material systems of the universe is the Redeemer of man- 
kind. He hath committed unto his ministers "the ministry of 
reconciliation." They are to make men see that " God is in Christ " 
personally as he is in the physical universe pervasively, and that he 
is " in Christ reconciling the world unto himself." Whatever will 
enable Christian preachers to do this for any one soul will surpass 
all valuation. Gospel preachers will be recreant if they let the 
enemy steal the guns God has mounted in that nature which is the 
symbol of omnipotent wisdom and turn them against that cross 
which is the sign of atoning and transforming grace. 

Then, for many reasons — for his intellectual recreation, develop- 
ment and strengthening; for the general enrichment of the soil of 
his mind ; for winning the respect and confidence of his hearers ; 
for the keeping of his own conviction robust and the attention of 
his congregation fixed ; for knowing what his hearers know and 
being able to teach them more ; for his own preservation from flat- 
ness, staleness, and unprofitableness ; for the enrichment of his dis- 
courses, that his parishioners may have gain ; for learning how to 
turn nineteenth-century eyes up to " consider the heavens" as they 
may now be considered, and those same eyes down to consider 
such lilies as grow in the nineteenth century as they never could 
have grown beneath the eyes of the peasants and priests who 
attended the Master's ministry; above all, that he may march 
boldly up to rebels, in the name of the Divine Majesty, and au- 
thoritatively demand the grounding of the arms of all intellectual 
rebellion ; that he may meet the responsibilities which the Lord in 
this age lays upon his embassadors, responsibilities which were not 
imposed on Paul or Chrysostom or Augustine ; that he may finish 
his course with joy, and his ministry, which he has received of the 
Lord Jesus — -the gospel minister of this age is bound to seize and 
use all the instrumentalities which this age affords for setting forth 
the truth as it is in nature, as the servant of the truth as it is in 
Jesus. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 1 83 

To examine all questions of history as they bear on the truths 
which God has revealed because they cannot be discovered by man ; 
to aid in all departments of scientific research ; to increase an ap- 
preciation of all true science in all departments of society; to assist 
in the culture of a sound philosophy, without which humanity, with 
all practicable scientific attainments, would be like a child with a 
lapful of jewels of the value of which he was ignorant, or an idiot 
who was the possessor of the most complicated and admirable 
machinery which he did not know how to work — these are among 
the objects of our Institute. Young as our Institute is, may we 
not rejoice, without immodesty, in the measure of success we have 
found ? Shall we not patiently persevere in a work which can at- 
tract to our side only the most thoughtful or large-hearted people, 
and must be wrought away from the glare of crowds and apart from 
the stimulus of applause ? 

Congratulating the Institute upon what it has done, and returning 
heart-felt thanks for all the help rendered me personally in the dis- 
charge of my duties in the presidency, I commend it to the provi- 
dence of that God to whom nothing is more precious than truth. 



PAUL AT ATHENS. 

[Delivered before the American Institute of Christian Philosophy, August 22, 1886.] 

The utterances and the methods of the greatest missionary pro- 
duced by Christianity must be well worth the study of all Christian 
thinkers and workers. In his apostolate Paul chose great cities as 
the centers of operation, and was undoubtedly directed and assisted 
therein by the Holy Spirit. He was in Jerusalem, in Athens, in 
Rome — the cities that represented religion and culture and power. 
Perhaps for the generation existing in the latter part of the nine- 
teenth century there are few points in the great apostle's history 
more needful and profitable to study than his visit to Athens, 
because it presents to us the first contact of Christianity with 
culture as developed in high art and philosophy. These were the 
only fields for culture, as science cannot be said to have existed in 
that day. 



1 84 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

Paul seems to have had no just idea of Athens before reaching 
that city ; but his quick eye took in the strategic advantages of the 
place for Christian movement, and he sent back to Berea for Silas 
and Timothy, that he might have these valued coadjutors in his 
apostolic work. In waiting for them he was not idle ; he studied 
Athens. While thus engaged he employed every opportunity that 
presented itself to plant the seed of the Gospel. 

The city was about sixteen centuries old when Paul saw it, and 
during a few of the centuries immediately preceding his visit it had 
been magnificently adorned by architecture and sculpture in the 
interests of the prevailing idolatry. Every-where there were temples. 
The small were elegant; the large were magnificent. Every-where 
there were altars to all the gods known to Greek mythology ; and, 
in the liberality and hospitality which ordinarily accompany spiritual 
indifference, there were to be found altars inscribed, " To an Un- 
known God." 

The gratification of his aesthetic instinct could not blind Paul to 
the deadly cancer which was eating out the spiritual life of the 
people under this complexion of external beauty ; nor did he for 'a 
moment feel that he was a mere curious traveler, or forget for a 
moment that he was a Christian missionary. On the Sabbath-day 
he reasoned with the Jews in their synagogue, and on the other days 
in the " market," the general gathering-place of the people. 

No man who has zeal for Christ ever lacks a place. He will 
labor with one man as earnestly as with a thousand ; in a chamber 
as cheerfully as in a cathedral. He that is faithful in the smallest 
place will be duly transferred to a larger. The apostle could not 
be concealed in the one little obscure synagogue of his compatriots 
and co-religionists, hid away in some corner of the splendid metrop- 
olis, but was soon drawn into the agora, a place where not only 
merchants of all kinds met, but statesmen, orators, poets, and 
philosophers — the fashionable assembly, in which it was requisite for 
a man to appear often if he desired to be counted as in Athenian 
" society." 

Stirred from without by the sight of the prevailing idolatry, and 
impelled from within by his constant zeal for his Master and the 
New Faith, Paul every-where set forth Jesus and the Resurrection. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. , 185 

However he varied his method of treatment, his fundamental 
theme was the Risen Jesus. There seemed to be perpetually 
present to his mind the thought that every human being had an 
immeasurable personal interest in Him who had been delivered for 
man's offenses and raised again for his justification. In the market- 
place, or, as we perhaps should call it, the assembly rooms, he 
was encountered by men who represented two of the leading schools 
of philosophy at that time in Athens — schools that were then more 
than two centuries old. 

The Stoics represented pantheism, believing that " the all," the 
universe, is God ; God is the universe. Believing the universe itself 
was a rational soul ; that it was impossible to separate God from 
matter ; that the soul was matter, and death was a return of this 
finer matter into the all-matter — that is, into God ; when they 
heard of the resurrection of the dead the announcement seemed so 
palpably absurd, in the presence of what they considered settled and 
unquestionable philosophical doctrine, that it was regarded as an 
impossibility. 

The Epicureans were downright materialists. There was matter, 
and nothing else. Whatever seems orderly and the product of 
design is merely the result of a fortuitous concurrence of the 
uncreated atoms which had eternally existed. This doctrine neces- 
sarily excluded God, the soul, morality, and responsibility. It 
involved the dissipation into the elements at death of all that we 
call matter and spirit — a distinction denied by them except as a dis- 
tinction of different kinds of matter. Of course that school could 
have no data of ethics beyond utility; nothing that involved future 
reward or retribution. To them, also, the resurrection was an 
absurdity. 

There was a third , school, not mentioned in the Acts of the 
Apostles, called the Academicians, who, at the time of Paul, taught 
that there was nothing which could be known of God, if there was 
a God. 

The apostle thus met, in his day, the variations of erroneous phi- 
losophy which confront Christianity in ours. Through eighteen 
centuries the gifted and laborious errorists have not been able to 
invent one new error. Toward the close of the nineteenth century 



1 86. CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

they are just what they were in the first — pantheists, materialists, 
and agnostics. Such we find them in Berlin, London, and New 
York to-day: such Paul found them in Athens eighteen centuries 
ago. But Christianity was fresh then, and the people he met had 
curiosity to know if it were possible to have a new school of thought. 
They induced Paul to go with them from the crowded agora to the 
quiet Areopagus, where, lifted above the multitude, secured from 
interruptions in the lofty place of their Supreme Court, they might 
ascertain the nature of this new philosophy. 

The mingling of politeness and irony in their invitation to Paul 
is just the same in its tones and cadences as that which marks the 
intercourse of the pantheists, the materialists, and the agnostics of 
the present day in their intercourse with the Christian thinkers. 
" We wish to be enabled to know what these strange things mean." 
The irony was in the implied disparagement of what they had 
already heard from Paul. " It cannot mean much if we cannot take 
it all in at a glance ! " is what the errorists of to-day intimate, as the 
errorists did in Athens. It is " strange " — that is, not at home in 
the realm of culture — if it be brought by any one who is not a pan- 
theist, or a materialist, or at least an agnostic. Paul accepted the 
challenge, took his position, and began his testimony for Jesus. 

His reply was polite, without any mixture of irony, and is in this 
an example to all Christian teachers. He spoke amid an inspiring 
environment. If he looked up, there stood the Acropolis, beauty- 
crowned, with the noblest products of the highest art piled in richest 
profusion and most graceful arrangement on the noblest altar in the 
land ; an offering to the gods worshiped by the populace but de- 
spised by the philosophers. If he looked down upon the city, there 
was that wondrous temple of Theseus, and the colossal Minerva, 
and the temples of the Furies and of Victory. Every-where worship 
had brought the skill of art to its adornment, and the best fruits of 
the age grew on the tree of its religion, even when that religion was 
idolatrous. 

Paul opened with words of politeness. A preacher' of religion, 
he recognizes his hearers as religious. He told them that wherever 
he turned his eyes he perceived, in all their works of art, that the 
Athenians were a more than commonly God-fearing people, intimat- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 1 87 

ing that he had seen no such exhibitions of religiousness in the 
other cities of Greece. It was a delicate compliment to their city, 
of which they were manifestly intensely proud. Thiswise exordium 
opened the way for the introduction of his own religion. He called 
their attention to the fact that in their beautiful Athens there was 
an altar inscribed, " To AN UNKNOWN GOD ;" and he mentions the 
fact rather in commendation than in disparagement. Such was the 
spirit of the apostle. His manner, also, is worthy of study. He 
employed all the admissions of their religion and philosophy, attack- 
ing nothing that is not radically wrong. Whatever a select circle 
of philosophers might hold, there was planted ineradicably in the 
nature of man the belief in the existence of God. Every form of 
idolatry was proof of that, and the munificence of expenditure in 
the temples about them proved that the theistic idea was at 
once powerful and practicable. It wrought itself out in altars of 
exquisite beauty and sanctuaries of surpassing splendor. What- 
ever, whoever, wherever God is, the instinct of the human heart is 
to honor him. Man prays from instinct as from instinct a babe 
draws its mother's milk or a bee constructs its polygonal cell. If 
prayer were the result of reasoning Professor Tyndall and others 
might propose to submit it to some " test " of reason ; but to sub- 
mit any instinct to such a test is a scientific absurdity. Following 
that instinct, when fancy and imagination had been exhausted there 
might still be a God — there might be gods — who should be honored. 
The feeling after God was gratified by erecting an altar to a god 
not yet known to the Athenians, or who, if known to their ancestors, 
was lost to them. Here, on such an altar, stood graven the con- 
fession of knowledge and of ignorance. It was not " To the Un- 
known God," for that would be an acknowledgment that there was 
but one God, and all their other altars were useless. Nor was it 
inscribed to " God the Unknown." He might be known to others if 
not to them. The legend on the altar was the pathetic confession 
of the Athenians that there was a God, and that they did not know 
him. 

Here was a pungent appeal to the philosophers about Paul. The 
people wanted to know God. The Stoics, the Epicureans, and the 
Academicians had been in Athens for generations. Were the phi- 



1 88 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

losophers no wiser, no better than the common people ? If so, 
their philosophies were valueless. If they were wiser and better, 
why did they not teach the people about God? " They did not 
know ? " Then this is a confession of ignorance. " What, therefore, 
ye worship in your ignorance," says Paul, " this set I forth unto 
you. * 

This is the stand for Christian teachers to take in this century. 
Let them say to the pantheists, the materialists, the agnostics of 
our age: " Gentlemen, teach the people God. If you cannot do 
that, because of your acknowledged ignorance, be still. We know 
God, and we will set him forth to the people." If they turn upon 
the Christian teachers and say, " That is your self-conceit ; we are 
humble ; we proclaim that, if there be a God, he is unknowable." 
Is that their humility? It is the arrogant assertion that they com- 
prehend the whole circle of the possible-to-be-known, and declare 
that God is not anywhere. It is the very modest assertion that 
what they do not know cannot be known by any other ; that what 
the deaf cannot hear is not sound, and what the blind cannot see 
is not color. To the child learning the third column of the multi- 
plication table the calculus is unknowable ; but we know that 
there are those to whom it is not unknowable. The Athenians had 
not the obstinate self-conceit of modern Herbert-Spencerians. 
They simply said, " There is a God ; to us he is Unknown." What 
Paul said in the circle of Athenian philosophers a Christian teacher 
may say to the pantheists, materialists, agnostics, and the unlettered 
masses : " What ye worship in your ignorance, this I set forth 
unto you." 

Taking the admission of the pantheists and the agnostics, accept- 
ing the implication of what had been graven on stone altars, 
assuming what is quite plain, that one cannot be agnostic and 
atheistic at the same time, because to assert that a being is unknow- 
able is to imply its existence, since it must be to be unknowable, the 
apostle confronts the errors of his hearers by proclaiming the 
truths of the Gospel. This is a most valuable example to all think- 
ers who are disposed to communicate their thoughts. It is unwise, 
if not wicked, to attempt to take from a man any faith, however 
defective and erroneous, until we are prepared to substitute a faith 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. i%g 

that is sound and true. A missionary must let the lowest African 
keep his fetich until he can give that savage a God who can be 
reasonably worshiped. What is the use of cutting off the top- 
growth of an error if its root be left to sprout? What better way 
to exclude poisonous growth than preoccupying the ground with 
seed and roots and shoots of truth ? 

It seems difficult to see how the apostle could have presented a 
briefer or more compact refutation of what was wrong in their 
theories and practices. He cuts at once at the core of their falla- 
cies. "God." "The God." There are not " gods," and polythe- 
ism is a falsehood based on a truth. There is a God. Atheism is 
the vacuum which humanity abhors. The God is a person. He 
has conscious existence, a designing intellect, a deciding will, and 
spontaneous activity. He is creator. He made " the all," and 
therefore he cannot be " the all," since it is inconceivable that any 
thing should be the creator of itself. The theory of pantheistic 
Stoics perishes before the conception of a personal creator, and the 
theory of the materialistic Epicureans perishes before the conception 
of a personality existing before all matter, and the conception of 
the production of the material by the immaterial. God is the pro- 
ducer of each thing, and not the product of any thing or of all 
things. He was before they were. He can be without them ; they 
cannot exist one moment without him. 

With what rapidity the apostle enlarges their horizon ! He does 
not argue. He asserts, authoritatively, as every Christian teacher 
must. The assertion of the personality of the One God gives him 
ground of appeal to their reason and conscience, which are always 
to be addressed by a Christian teacher. Looking above him the 
apostle saw the temple-crowned Acropolis. Beautiful for situation, 
the joy of architecture, how small a thing was that sanctuary as a 
house for Him who had made all the marble in all the quarries of 
the earth, and all the wit in all the brains of men, and all the 
heavens above the earth ! And how small a thing that stone Athena 
Polias, the goddess, compared with Him who made and who fills 
the earth and the heavens. He pressed this upon his hearers. 
Looking below him, how many an altar-place must have caught his 
eye! Perhaps at the moment priests were seen leading garlanded 



1 9 o CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

victims amid sacrificial ceremonials. What can that mean? Does 
the God who made all things have a need which can be supplied 
from human resources? Such is the degrading implication of idol- 
atry. But it is a belittling falsehood, shooting its poisonous arrows 
in many directions. The whole system of pagan sacrifices was an 
attempt to bribe the God that was worshiped. It was founded on 
a falsehood which reversed the facts of the universe. There is not 
any thing which God has not made. There is no such thing as 
natura naturans without God, no " that which makes " outside of 
God. Such a thought is unmixed heathenism. The Athenian 
paganism was better than that. " Manufactured sanctuaries," as 
Paul called them, were built by the hands God had made, and con- 
structed of the materials which God made. If God were spiritually 
worshiped therein, well and good ; but it is against all reason to 
attempt to confine the illimitable God within any walls or to 
regard as unsacred any part of the universe he has made. 

This naturally leads Paul to deal a blow at the mechanical theory 
of the universe. It is not an automatic machine. While " the all" 
is not God, God is every-where present in " the all," and, having 
created it, he preserves it by perpetual and immediate immanence. 
This is the doctrine we must constantly press against the godless 
scientific hypotheses of the day. On no system of philosophy 
which does not teach the active presence of God every-where can 
we supply the gaps of science. What is life? Whence comes it? 
How is it continued ? These are questions for which science has 
no answer. And there has never been a scientific theory which 
accounted for the breaks, the catastrophes, the cataclysms which so 
often appear in nature. Any form of the modern doctrine of evolu- 
tion is a tangled web, a field of concealed pitfalls, or a mere scientific 
dream, a hypothesis utterly unprovable on scientific grounds, if God- 
be omitted. But, in the philosophy of Paul's Areopagite speech, life 
is that which God constantly ministers out of himself to some of 
his creatures, by which he keeps them differentiated, as animals 
and plants, from all inorganic bodies. 

This truth glorifies man while it honors God. The old stoical 
and epicurean systems degraded both God and man, by making 
both only parts of and dependents upon " the all," or God nothing, 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 191 

and man no better than mud. God ministers life and he ministers 
air and all other things necessary for life. Nothing comes of itself. 
God " is giving " every thing. Correct ideas of God lead to correct 
ideas of man. The unity of God and the unity of the human race 
go together. One God, one humanity ; many gods, many human- 
ities. Polytheism had produced national narrowness and pride. 
The Athenians believed themselves sprung from the ground, abo- 
rigines, and despised all other peoples. This prevailed wherever 
paganism existed. The concept of one personal, creating, preserv- 
ing God is the concept without which science can have no unifying 
idea as regards either nature or the race of mankind. Starting with 
the unity of race, we must reach the oneness of God ; believing in 
different natural origins, it is not difficult to reach different mythol- 
ogies ; and polytheism genders and maintains race differences, 
while monotheism begets and preserves the idea of the unity of 
humanity. 

The apostle presses his hearers further. Not only does each 
individual existence depend upon the constant ministry of life from 
God, but nationality is perpetuated and national life limited by the 
volition of the Master of heaven and of earth. How far the Greek 
nation should extend, what should be the limits of the influence of 
Greek culture, and what the duration of the national life, were all 
dependent upon God's direct execution of his own will concerning 
them, since he has fixed the boundaries of the nations and arranged 
the system of their duration and succession. Paul teaches his 
hearers the necessity of depending as a nation upon God, and lays 
down the fundamental principle of international intercourse, comity, 
and prosperity, in the acknowledgment of the sovereignty of God 
over the family of nationalities. The race can never attain to its 
highest possible condition until " the parliament of man" shall 
recognize the sovereignty of God and employ its powers in devising 
measures to have his will done every- where on earth as that will is 
in heaven. There is thus found a sufficiently high reason for the 
existence of individuals and of nations and of providential national 
history — that men might seek God. If there be no God to seek, 
then the universe is aimless, and science is impossible, because it 
has no foundation and no unifying idea. But in the very grammati- 



1 92 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

cal construction of his sentence Paul showed that he believed that 
the unaided efforts of man would be fruitless in the effort to find 
what God is if man were not assisted by some revelation. So near 
— and yet so far is God from each individual. 

And then the apostle, following the suggestion of his statement, 
that God " is not far from each one of us," utters the sentence 
which must be the revealed basis of all stable science and the nexus 
of all consistent philosophical thought. 

" In Him we live, and move, and have our being." 

The pantheists who were present could not seize this as an admis- 
sion of their theory, since the speaker had in advance guarded against 
that by asserting that God was the creator of the universe and the 
ruler of heaven and earth, and must therefore exist independently 
of all things. On the other hand, the absorption of any part of the 
universe by God, the Hindu Nirvana theory, has no place. The 
apostle's statement of his philosophic system maintains the indi- 
vidual personality of man and the individual personality of God, 
and states the relation of the two. " Each one of us " is " in God ; " 
and it is because of that relation that we "live" and "move" and 
" exist." 

The scientific canon is that that hypothesis which accounts for 
the largest number of known phenomena is to be adopted as the 
working hypothesis. Eighteen hundred years have passed since 
Paul's address was delivered, and the later years have been dis- 
tinguished by ever-increasing scientific activity. The result is that 
if one hundred men be now selected as the most able and trust- 
worthy teachers of science it is probable that no six of them would 
agree upon even a definition of life, and possibly no three of them 
would be willing to stake their reputation upon the assertion that 
any single theory accounted for the majority of the known phe- 
nomena — except the theory announced in Paul's Areopagite address. 
The scientific teacher may affirm that no one knows what life is, 
beyond this: that it is that which has come from without upon 
inorganic matter, and therefore must have come from some living 
thing, since there is no life which has not come from life. Now 
that this life should not have fallen on all, and should have fallen 
upon some inert matter and made it vegetable, and upon some 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 193 

inert and vegetable existences and made them animal, and upon 
some animal life and made it spirit, involves (1) choice; (2) volition, 
and (3) spontaneous activity of the previous life. These give that 
life the characteristics of personality. The dissipation of energy in 
all living things involves the necessity of continuous re-supply. 
Paul's theory accounts for all this. Given an ever-present Person, 
who has exhaustless stores of life, and you have a unifying scientific 
idea. Exclude that idea, and you have no rational theory to 
account for the three things in Paul's three verbs which express 
existence, motion, life. 

Now, having very boldly and clearly set forth this much of his 
gospel philosophy, the apostle wisely again conciliates his hearers 
by reminding them that this truth had been uttered by certain 
Greek poets whom he quotes. What the people had taken as a 
poetical rhapsody, and what the writers even may have regarded as a 
poetical figure, was the exact utterance of a strict truth : " We are 
His offspring." He concludes his argument against the worship of 
images by showing how irrational was the pagan habit of thought 
in which the religious cult of idol-worship had its root. Men are 
the offspring of the Creator and Lord of heaven and earth, while 
silver and gold and stone are the inert inorganic creatures produced 
by God's power. It violates all the sanctities of thought for the 
former to cherish the notion that " the divine " is like these minerals 
and metals. The very fact that a man had taken up a piece of 
marble and deliberated which god he should make, and how that 
god should be represented, and that even the representation of 
his ideal would depend upon the amount of his skill, ought to 
make idolatry repugnant. A comparison of any idol, even of 
their great Minerva, with any living Greek woman who was an off- 
spring of God, would show what a bridgeless abyss lay between 
the most exquisite production of human skill and the breathing, 
smiling, dancing, thinking, loving, and lovable daughter of God. 
Then how measureless the difference between the idol and the 
divine \ 

In all this discourse there is exhibited the wisdom of the apostle in 
avoiding personal offense while striving to destroy a powerful and 
deep-rooted falsehood which was injuring the individual and national 
13 



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life. He does not say, "You have been altogether in error in this 
matter ; " but he says, "We ought not so to think." 

Having shown that God had made revelation in the world's 
creation and man's conscience he began to complete his discourse 
by statements of God's revelation in redemption. God had allowed 
sufficient time to elapse for man's study of the two former. He 
had shown no special vengeance against an idolatry which had so 
dishonored him, leaving men merely to the injury which such error 
could but produce. " But now he commandeth men that they 
should all every-where change their mind " and have right thoughts 
of God. A great crisis had come to the world. It was to be 
judged. It was to be judged in righteousness. It was judged 
in a man. God had ordained that man. God had appointed 
that day. The judgment of the world would turn on its faith in 
him. A man's character would be formed by his faith in him. A 
man's intellectual and spiritual destiny would be determined by his 
faith in him. He is the crisis, the judgment, of the world. As 
such it was necessary that there should be afforded to men a 
most sure foundation for their faith ; that sufficient basis was laid in 
that Man's resurrection from the dead. 

And then the philosophers and the common people united, by 
indifference and by mockery, in breaking up this grand, lofty, and 
compact discourse, to which Plato and Socrates would probably 
have listened with rapt attention. But the earnest apostle had 
succeeded, as has been well suggested by another, in opening to 
the eyes of some God's revelation by creation and the history of 
man ; God's revelation to man's rationality and conscience ; and 
God's revelation in the law and the Gospel. If he had only been 
allowed to render full explication of the lines of thought so rapidly, 
so broadly, and so accurately drawn, and if a faithful report could 
have been transmitted to us, the world would have a complete 
sketch of Christian philosophy. What we do possess is, at this day, 
of more value to mankind than all else that has come down from 
all the literature of Greece. 

While Paul spoke the idols crowded the streets and crowned the 
heights of Athens, and pantheists, materialists, and agnostics held 
the schools and ruled the tribunals of the city that was the eye of 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 195 

Greece, as Greece was the eye of the world. To-day those idols 
and altars are merely curiosities of art ; their worship has been 
dead forages; and the Porch and the Academjr are things of the 
past. "The Man" whom God had ordained has been worshiped 
on the Acropolis, and is this day worshiped in the palace of 
the king of Greece, and is the only thing in heaven or earth receiving 
distinctive religious homage in the city of Athens. The system of 
philosophy in Paul's discourse is to-day maintained and explained 
and enforced by more brains and moral power, and with more rich- 
ness of illustration, than ever before since Paul's voice was drowned 
in the mockery of the men who could sneer at what they could not 
controvert. And to-day any man's intellectual and moral worth, 
his height, and breadth, and w T eight among men are all measured by 
that man's faith in THE Man whom God has ordained to be the 
world's judgment, " whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, 
in that he hath raised him from the dead." 



A DEFENSE OF THE SUPERSTITIONS OF SCIENCE. 

In the first decade of this century a French peasant-girl was at 
her outdoor work of tending sheep, when an iron chain suddenly 
fell at the feet of the young shepherdess as if it had been dropped 
out of the heavens. Apparently it could have come from nowhere 
else, since, in that open field, there was nothing between her head 
and the cloudless sky. She doubtless regarded it with superstitious 
awe. Very many centuries before her time an image was reported 
to have so dropped down from heaven and became the object of 
superstitious regard, not simply to unlettered peasants, but to 
poets, philosophers, and kings. Why might not the great God, 
who, she had been taught to believe, had made revelations through 
women, have set some spirit free and, having materialized the chain 
that bound it, flung it at the feet of this virgin, to be the symbol 
of the emancipation of intellect and spirit, and the perpetual stimu- 
lus to human thirst for freedom? Thousands of worshipers might 
have been drawn to a shrine constructed for this chain, and a serw 



I9 6 ' CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

ice instituted such as had made the Hellenic temples of Dodona 
and Olympia famous. 

That such a state of affairs did not come to pass is due to the 
fact that it was soon discovered that a young man, then not much 
known even in his own country, but now known to the whole world 
of science, was making experiments in aerostation, and that the 
chain had fallen from Gay Lussac's balloon as he crossed the country. 
When the maiden recovered from her astonishment and looked up 
to see if this strange thing had left trace of its descent in the air, 
the balloon, which was nearly 20,000 feet above the earth's surface, 
failed to arrest her sight or had passed out of the field of her 
vision. 

Just as she knew the facts, before knowledge of the balloon 
reached her, what was that peasant-girl to conclude ? The chain 
had fallen from a great height, as its thud on the ground indicated. 
There was no tree, no tower, no mountain, near. It came sheer 
from the sky to the earth, so far as she could at all discover. If 
the French girl and her neighbors and the whole country had be- 
lieved that, we now know that it would have been a superstition, 
because it would have been a belief in that which was not capable 
of being demonstrated, if true, and not capable of demonstration as 
false, if false. If the knowledge of the balloon be excluded she 
could not have demonstrated to herself, and no man could have 
demonstrated to another, that the chain fell down from the regions 
beyond our terrestrial atmosphere ; and yet what else was there to 
believe in the premises? 

This comparatively recent fact indicates the genesis of many a 
superstition, ancient and modern. The human race is never with- 
out superstition. Religion does not destroy it. Science seems to 
foster it. In all minds, however trained or however uncultivated, 
it maintains its ineradicable growth. Is not the nineteenth cent- 
ury after Christ as superstitious — that is, as much given to the be- 
lief of things which cannot be formally proved or disproved, as was 
the nineteenth century before Christ ? The external development 
may vary, while the internal germ remains the same. That which 
is the exhibition of superstition in a man to his fellow is that man's 
basis of intellectual growth and practical living, Because a propo- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 1 97 

sition cannot be shown to the logical understanding to be true, by 
processes of ratiocination amounting to a demonstration, is not 
proof that it is not true. No man can thus prove his own existence 
to another. Any syllogism he can construct must necessarily as- 
sume, in at least one of its premises, the very thing to be proved. 
But still he may believe it, yes, and must believe it. Some exterior 
logician may remonstrate with him as being superstitious, in be- 
lieving the unprovable, but the interior, informal logic of his soul 
grasps the proposition of his existence as expressing a fact always 
certain to his consciousness. 

And so it comes to pass that superstition is not confined to the 
domain of religion. Some ages are marked by emphasis of religious 
superstition, others by that which is practical, others by that which 
is scientific. 

Ours is an age that falls in the last of these categories. The 
tendency is to cling all the faster to those superstitions which take 
their shape from science, as we abandon those which take their color 
from religion. It is a remarkable fact that all the fundamental be- 
liefs among scientific men, beliefs in which they are unanimous, those 
dogmas which may be considered to be the embodiment of the 
catholic doctrine of the Church Scientific, are just as certainly 
superstitious — that is to say, beliefs in unproved and. unprovable 
propositions — as ever were the religious superstitions of ancient 
Greece or Rome, or as now are the religious superstitions of the 
Brahmans of Central India. 

In having your attention solicited to these scientific superstitions 
you are asked to remember that no attack is made upon them. 
Their soundness is not even questioned. So far from striving to 
overthrow them the present speaker unites with all well-informed 
persons in giving his sincere adhesion to these forms of faith. His 
object is to point out the important fact that they lie outside the 
realm of reason and inside the domain of imagination or faith, but 
are nevertheless found to be credible. 

Let us look, first of all, into the department of logic, the science 
of sciences ; the creator, preserver, and redeemer of sciences. Its 
great implement is the syllogism, a thorough knowledge of the 
powers and uses of which, it is believed, enables any man to detect 



193 



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any fallacy in any process of reasoning, deductive or inductive, 
carried forward either formally or informally. 

It seems impossible to overvalue this knowledge. The process 
rests on the famous dictum of Aristotle, that whatever can be affirmed 
or denied of a class can be affirmed or denied of every member thereof. 
A simple illustration of a syllogism in the first figure of the first mood 
is this : All men are mortal ; John is a man ; therefore, John is mortal. 
Another, to take an example from the department of science, is this: 
All conductors are non-electrics ; liquids are conductors ; therefore, 
liquids are non-electrics. Forages this has been one of the idols of 
the study. No Bushman in the wilds of Southern Africa has wor- 
shiped his fetich more reverently than the schoolmen, through 
a thousand years, have regarded this process and the great dictum 
on which this process is based. Its foundation, however, is a 
superstition. 

We believe that in all correct deduction there are two premises 
which are true, from which must be inferred a third, which is also 
true ; but let us notice that of those two that are true one em- 
braces the other, so that the Port Royal logicians called the major 
premise the containing, and the minor the explicative premise. 
The real difficulty in this case lies in the fact that none but an om- 
niscient being can be certain that the major or containing premise, 
if it be a universal affirmative or universal negative, can be true. 
For instance, if I assert that " all men are mortal " it is a mere as- 
sumption. I do not know all the men who are living at present. 
If they are living they are not dead ; if they are not dead they may 
or may not be mortal. Myriads of human beings, it would seem, 
had lived upon the globe before I came. I have known only a few, 
those few whom I found here. Of those who preceded me I have 
only the testimony in regard to some few that they were actually 
seen to die and were actually buried ; but there are multitudes who 
may have been translated, who may have glided off our plane and 
out of our sphere in some other way than by process of mortality. 
So, when I affirm that all men are mortal I am simply stating what 
I do not know, what no other man knows, and what, even if it be 
true, no finite being can demonstrate to be true. To be sure of any 
universal proposition one must know the universe. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



I 99 



The same remarks are applicable to the scientific illustration. 
No man knows all conductors of electricity, and therefore he cannot 
have sensible knowledge that all conductors are non-electrics. If, 
then, this proposition be true, no man can demonstrate its truth. 

Thus, in this very process of reasoning we commence with the as- 
sumption of what cannot be known to be true; if true, to prove what 
we assume to be true in the very beginning of the process of prov- 
ing its truth. It is not only faith in an assumption, but it is faith 
in an assumption which cannot possibly be demonstrated, if true. 

This escapes us, probably, because we do not ordinarily state our 
reasoning in a formal way. We say, " John is mortal because he is 
a man," and assume that all men are mortal — an assumption which 
may or may not be true, but which is manifestly incapable of proof, 
if true. 

And so it is through every department of dialectic science. All 
the things we consider most clear, most safe, most incontrovertible, 
are propositions that either in themselves are incapable of proof, if 
true, or propositions which rest upon other propositions that cannot 
be proved to be true, even if they are true, and, what is more, can- 
not be disproved if they are false, as they are outside of reason and 
apparently can have no residence outside of faith. 

No religious superstition involves a larger and more gratuitous 
unproved and unprovable assumption than the primal and indis- 
pensable dogma of dialectics. That immense assumption I think I 
most clearly perceive ; and yet I stand up here and solemnly and 
sincerely say, "Credo! I believe in the Aristotelian dictum, de 
otnni et nullo" And when I repeat this creed all men who belong 
to the Catholic Church Scientific are bound, under penalty of 
excommunication, to respond " Amen." 

From mind let us now turn to matter. If there be any thing of 
which we ought to know something it is matter, and the constitu- 
tion thereof. Matter is open to all our senses. If we cannot ascer- 
tain what matter is, can we learn any thing absolutely ? 

Now, what does science teach us in regard to matter ? 

To ancient thought matter was infinitely divisible. It was ap- 
parently fairly argued that it is impossible to conceive of particles 
so small as not to be capable of division. But the modern chem- 



200 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

ist assumes that, in point of fact, the divisibility of matter has a 
limit. This is what Liebig says : " The chemist merely maintains 
the firm and immutable foundations of his science when he admits 
the existence of physical atoms as an incontrovertible truth." 

Now, it so happens that what is assumed to be an incontrovertible 
truth in regard to the constitution of matter is a proposition which, 
if true, cannot be demonstrated, and which, if untrue, cannot be re- 
futed by demonstration. No man pretends to have ever seen an 
atom. 

Moreover, it presents for our belief as absolutely fundamental to 
all physical science that which we cannot even conceive. 

Look at the very name, " atom : " that which cannot be cut or 
divided — that is, has no parts. To believe the accepted doctrine of 
the ultimate constitution of matter we accept two propositions that 
are absolutely irreconcilable. We believe in the existence of some 
matter so small that it cannot be cut or divided, while we believe 
that no matter can exist without the very qualities which furnish 
the basis of conceivable subdivision. 

In our imaginations we divide and subdivide and re-subdivide, 
and follow out these imaginings of subdivisions infinitely ; that is 
to say, we may be engaged in this process for millions of years, 
doing nothing else, and yet there will remain in the mind the con- 
cept of a particle of matter, on which the imagination can play with 
scissors of infinite smallness, still subdividing in scscula sceciilorum. 

An atom is not only an unknowable, but an unthinkable thing to 
any mind that is not infinite. You must first believe in a person 
of boundless intellect before you can form to yourself the idea of a 
person who can even think " atom" much less know " atom ; " that 
is to say, a person who can have an intelligent cognition connected 
with the word " atom " must have a power of perception to 
follow down abysses of subdivision beyond all that man can ac- 
complish in this department of thought. But it is held by many 
to be a superstition to believe in the existence of such a person 
because that would be to believe in what cannot be proved, if true. 
A man who should believe in such a personality would be as irra- 
tional as the man who believes in an infinite God. If it be super- 
stition to believe in a God of infinite personality then science fosters 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 201 

superstition when it comes to us with its first fundamental propo- 
sition in regard to the ultimate constitution of mere matter, and 
demands of us belief in that which is as difficult of conception as 
any infinity and which requires for the existence of the conception 
of itself a previous belief in a person equal to an infinite God. 

There is much more superstition in believing the atomic theory 
than in believing what any deist or any trinitarian or any polytheist 
believes. 

In this connection science demands some other things of us ; 
namely, that we shall believe that all the atoms of the same element 
possess exactly the same weight, that the atoms of different 
elements possess different weights, and that the number indicating 
the weight of the atom of any element is the same in the combin- 
ing or equivalent number for that element. 

Well, here again a great demand is made upon our faith. . An atom 
is infinitely small — that is, has no size whatever ; for if it have size 
it can be divided. But having no size we must believe it has weight, 
and all atoms must be of the same size, since they all have no size ; 
and yet, being of the same size they have different weights, although 
none of them can have any weight, because they have no size. An 
atom that has weight is an inconceivable thing. No superstition of 
Christian, Mohammedan, Jew, pagan or savage, ever demanded of 
its devotees what we all most steadfastly believe who adopt the 
modern science of chemistry. That science depends upon this 
proposition: that any compound substance has exactly the same 
constituents in the same proportions wherever found. 

Take two examples: water and common salt. 

Each molecule of water invariably consists of two atoms of hydro- 
gen and one atom of oxygen (H 2 0). The weight of an atom of 
hydrogen (which is the lightest known element) is represented by 
the figure I, and it is taken as the standard of comparison of the 
atomic weights of other substances. Compared with an atom of 
hydrogen an atom of oxygen weighs 16. 

A molecule of common salt consists of one (i) atom of chlorine 
35!- times heavier than an atom of the standard of comparison, 
hydrogen, and one atom of sodium, which is 23 times heavier than 
the hydrogen atom. 



202 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

Upon analysis we get these quantities ; in synthesis we use these 
quantities. Water, salt, and all other compound substances are put 
together in obedience to certain fixed laws of proportion, invariable 
in the same kind of compound, although different in the different 
substances. Matter has a mathematical constitution, so mathemat- 
ical that we can form tables expressive in numbers of the constitu- 
tion of any chemical compound. 

Oxygen, whose atomic weight is, as we have seen, 16, combines 
with carbon, whose atomic weight is 12, in two proportions. First, 
in the proportion of an atom of each, giving rise to the compound 
carbonic (mon) oxide (C O), whose molecular weight is therefore 16 
plus 12, or 28 ; second, in the proportion of 1 atom of carbon to 2 
of oxygen, forming the compound carbon di-oxide or carbonic acid 
(C 2 ) whose molecular weight is 12 plus 16 plus 16, or 44. 

It will be perceived that the proportion of oxygen in carbonic 
acid is a multiple by 2 of that in carbonic oxide. 

Again, the atomic weight of nitrogen is 14 — that is, one atom of 
nitrogen is 14 times as heavy as an atom of the standard, hydrogen. 
Up to date we have made ourselves acquainted with five distinct 
chemical compounds of nitrogen with oxygen, namely: 

1. Nitrogen mon-oxide, containing 28 parts by weight of nitrogen 
to 16 of oxygen. 

2. Nitrogen di-oxide, containing 28 parts by weight of nitrogen 
to 32 of oxygen. 

3. Nitrogen tri-oxide, containing 28 parts by weight of nitrogen 
to 48 of oxygen. 

4. Nitrogen tetr-oxide, containing 28 parts by weight of nitrogen 
to 64 of oxygen. 

5. Nitrogen pent-oxide, containing 28 parts by weight of nitrogen 
to 80 of oxygen. 

It will be seen that the oxygen contained in these compounds is 
in the proportion of the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, to one and the same 
quantity of nitrogen — a striking example of what science teaches as 
the law of chemical combination in multiple proportion ; always a 
simple multiple and never an intermediate quantity. 

It is also held that numerical laws of combination apply to com- 
pounds as well as to elements. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 203 

Now what is the demand on this ground which science makes of 
Us ? It is that we shall believe in some personality who has the 
intelligence and power to dive far below the soundings of the plum- 
met of human observation into a region to which the most powerful 
microscope has no passport, and there shape things so small that 
they can have no size and yet are capable of uniting with one 
another according to certain fixed laws of proportion and according 
to no other, so that it is utterly impossible that men can invent any 
way of contravening these proportionate combinations. One atom 
of oxygen must always and every-where unite with two atoms of 
hydrogen to produce one molecule of water. It is not in the skill 
or power of man to reverse this proportion and make 1 of hydrogen 
unite with 2 of oxygen. There is a fatalism, iron, adamantine, 
unbreakable, through all the physical universe, and I must believe 
this if I am going to pursue the study of chemistry. I cannot 
explain it, nay, I cannot conceive it ; but yet I must believe that 
two things, neither of which in the nature of things can have any 
weight — because the moment either has weight it ceases to be an 
atom — that two things, each of which has no weight, come together 
with one other thing that has no weight, and that these three things 
that have no weight produce a fourth thing that has weight ; and that 
these proportions are fatal. We call the Mohammedan superstitious, 
who, when the stroke of fate comes, quietly says, "Allah il Allah," 
and submits, because he believes that every thing is weighed and 
measured and fixed in the scales of his fatalistic God ; not only 
believing with the Christian in a general and a special Providence, 
but believing that no man can draw one breath more or less, live 
one minute more or less, than that which is fatally allotted. There 
is not in any religion a greater superstition than the belief which 
science demands in offering the atomic theory to our minds. 

With open eyes I see that the atomic theory lies wholly outside 
whatever maybe claimed as rationalism, and wholly within the region 
of imagination, or faith, or superstition ; and yet I stand up here and 
solemnly and sincerely say, "Credo ! I do believe in a doctrine which 
applies definite and unalterable proportions to those things which 
can have no proportions." And when I repeat this creed every pro- 
fessor of physical science, even when he suspects that this dogma is 



204 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

soon to be numbered with the dead scientific beliefs which lie around 
the cradle of progressive thought like the strangled serpents* around 
the cradle of the infant Hercules ; and every believer in the current 
science of the world, on pain otherwise of being excommunicated 
from the Catholic Church Scientific, is bound to respond "Amen." 

The phenomena of radiant heat and of light create the genesis of 
another scientific superstition. 

" Heat," said Mr. Locke, " is a very brisk agitation of the inscru- 
table parts of an object which produces in us that sensation from 
which we denominate the object hot ; so what in our sensation is 
heat, in the object is nothing but motion." This theory has been 
maintained and greatly illustrated by researches since the time of 
Mr. Locke. It is now held that all particles of all matter are always 
in motion, so that in all matter there is more or less heat. Professor 
Tyndall has treated magnificently of "heat as a mode of motion." 
Heat existing anywhere produces motion, and motion produces heat. 
Two plates of metal, say one of zinc and one of platinum, may be 
placed in a vessel containing acid. Kept apart in the acid, let them 
be connected outside by a copper wire. What happens ? What is 
called an electric current is generated by the chemical action of the 
acid on the metals. This can be made sufficiently powerful to pro- 
duce heat that shall travel through the surrounding air or along con- 
ductors, and be raised to so high a temperature as to be luminous. 

The motion of particles in the sun generates a heat which comes 
over the great space of more than 95,000,000 of miles to our atmos- 
phere, and through our atmosphere to the earth, and to all things that 
exist on the earth. This heat is the effect of the pulsation of calorific 
particles, a pulsation which generates a system of waves, which 
waves impinge on our nerves and give us a sensation the conscious- 
ness of which we call heat. But what sustains that system of waves? 
Along what is it propagated ? We think that we know that it is 
atmospheric air through which the sound-waves are propagated to 
our auditory nerve. But these heat-waves have come over vast cold 

* For this figure I acknowledge my indebtedness to Professor Huxley, who says, " Extinguished 
theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes about that of Hercules." 

This paragraph was written in the summer of 1878. Perhaps before its publication the atomic 
theory may be abandoned. So much more fixed are the foundations of science than those of 
religioD I 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 20$ 

tracts, the coldness of which is so frigid as to be incapable of ther- 
mometry measurement, in which atmospheric air can have no exist- 
ence. What is it that has been undulated? If I hold a long 
iron rod by one end while the other end is in a furnace in full blast 
by and by the rod will become so hot — that is, contact with it will 
so increase my consciousness of the sensation produced by heat that 
I must drop the rod. From the furnace to my hand how did the 
heat travel ? Not along the line of the iron atoms, for they have 
not undulated, and no two of them are ever in contact or can be 
made to touch each other. Heat makes the atoms withdraw from 
one another. What, then, undulated ? A something which science 
calls ether. 

Again : For many years Newton's theory in regard to light pre- 
vailed throughout the scientific world. It was believed that luminous 
bodies emitted particles of exceeding fineness, and that these par- 
ticles falling upon the back of the eye gave us that which we receive 
from light. How these particles were driven over such immeasur- 
able spaces, and how, when they reached the eye, they passed through 
the ball to the retina was not explained ; but in the face of the well- 
known fact that the smallest conceivable particle of matter coming 
from the distance at which light from the sun would enter the eye, 
and driven with the momentum necessary for the diffusion of light 
over such measureless spaces, would utterly destroy the eye, still 
the emission doctrine of light was believed by hundreds and thou- 
sands of intelligent, scientific men. Nothing more thoroughly absurd, 
nothing more contrary to the facts in nature and reason in man, has 
ever been believed by any body of pagan, Jewish, or Christian theolo- 
gians. It was a mere superstition, the high-priest of which was no 
less a person than the justly revered Sir Isaac Newton. 

Nevertheless even scientific men are not going to rest quietly 
under the burden of the same superstition forever ; if they can do 
no more, when they become tired of bearing the burden upon one 
shoulder they will shift it upon the other. 

The prevailing superstition among us now is what is called the 
nndulatory theory of light. The phenomena of light are supposed 
to be the result of waves ; waves gendered by the pulsations of the 
particles of a luminous body. These waves are supposed to travel 



206 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

at a right angle with the pulsations, and it is thought that figures 
are produced upon the retina of the eye by the termination of these 
waves, as sound is produced upon the auditory nerve in the ear by 
the termination of waves coming through the atmosphere. A wave 
is not matter, but is a condition of matter. A little boy at a tub of 
water puts his cork in the center and fancies it a ship. He then 
agitates the water at one side and creates waves which travel across 
the tub. His cork bobs up and down in the same place if it be not 
attracted toward his hand nor driven to the opposite of the tub. 
A wave passes through the water and lifts and lowers the particles 
at the surface of the water, the peculiarity being that the last which 
is lifted is the first lowered. Now, every wave requires matter, 
which matter may recede from solidity more or less, but must be 
elastic. 

To account for light the hypothesis is adopted that throughout 
the universe there is a medium which, for want of a better name, 
we call ether. This medium pervades all the most solid bodies, all 
liquids, and all gases. It is a boundless ocean of substance on which 
all other substances float. No two atoms of the most compact min- 
eral or vegetable substance, hammered gold-leaf or lignum-vitce, are 
in immediate contact; they never can be made to touch. They can 
be caused to separate by increase of heat, or to approach by decrease 
of heat ; but mark: it is not the atom that is heated, it is the ether 
in which these atoms of matter exist. When we have come down 
to the ultimate constitution of matter there is a perpetual separa- 
tion between the atoms ; that which separates is that which holds 
them together, and that is ether. We get sound by motion of the 
atmosphere, but the atmosphere itself is an exceedingly coarse thing 
as compared with the ether. The particles of the air are in the 
ether. It is not the ether that is disturbed by the sound-producer, 
it is the atmosphere ; and, no matter how rare that atmosphere may 
be, its particles are to the ether as a dozen cherries in a goblet 
of water are to the water. That is to say, when atoms of the 
material universe are put, so to speak, in the cup of the universe, 
the ether may be considered as the water that is poured into the gob- 
let and fills up the interstices between the globules. 

You make a very thick plate-glass and hold it up to the sun. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 207 

Light comes through. We must remember that that light has come 
through something that is not air, because our atmosphere does not 
extend much more than fifty miles toward the sun, while the light 
has come millions of miles through something, or through nothing, 
before it reached our atmosphere, and has then come through our 
atmosphere, and then, instead of impinging upon the glass, and 
finding its path arrested, it has gone through the glass, in which 
there is no more air than there is in the wide celestial spaces. Now 
what is this path along which light can travel? It is something 
capable of being agitated into waves, of size greater or less. We 
call it ether. It exists in the dark — in the dread dark of the inter- 
stellar spaces. Light lives in the sun, is buried in the space which 
intervenes between the sun and the earth, and finds its resurrec- 
tion in our atmosphere, and its heaven in our eyes. But a continu- 
ous wave system, from the throbbing, luminous particles in the sun 
to our eye, is necessitated by this hypothesis, and the substance 
which sustains this wave system we call ether. 

This is our sublimest scientific superstition. Mr. Tyndall says 
that " the most important physical conception that the mind of 
man has yet achieved " is " the conception of a medium filling 
space, and fitted mechanically for the transmission of light and 
heat, as air is fitted for the transmission of sound." (Fragments of 
Science, Eng. ed., pp. 176, 177.) He also says, "If a single phe- 
nomenon could be pointed out which the ether is proved incompe- 
tent to explain, we should have to give it up ; but no such phe- 
nomenon has ever been pointed out." {Ibid. p. 223.) The brilliant 
professor may be a little rash in this statement. We shall not give 
it up for failing to explain some " single phenomenon." We shall 
hold to it — although if it be true it is utterly impossible of demon- 
stration — we shall hold to it until some other superstition more 
powerful to charm our imagination shall drive this from the field. 

Assume that this ether is matter, however fine. If so, the whole 
body of ether, like the whole body of the atmosphere, must be 
composed of atoms which do not come in contact with one another. 
What fills the interstitial spaces then ? Some still more ethereal 
ether? If so, that finer ether must be composed of atoms floating 
in some superfine ether, which superfine ether again is composed 



2o3 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

of other atoms floating in superfine ether, and so on, ad infin- 
itum. 

O, do not be profane and laugh, good friends, and say that our 
" most important physical conception " is akin to the oriental su- 
perstition of the world standing on an elephant, and that on a huge 
tortoise, and so on down, one thing standing upon another thing so 
far down as to go beyond the boundary of our vision, in depths 
down which to look makes us so dizzy and sick that we do not 
longer care whether every thing is nothing or nothing is every 
thing. 

But as touching ether this is our sincere creed : We believe that 
there is a substance that pervades all space. It is of infinite elas- 
ticity, and is wholly unaffected by gravity. It is absolutely indis- 
pensable to hold, meanwhile, that gravity affects every single particle 
of matter; that nothing is matter which is not under the law of 
gravity. Moreover, the general belief is that every thing is either 
matter or spirit ; although there are those who believe that no sub- 
stance exists except matter, and that what seem to be phenomena 
of mental action are simply products of matter of the finest kind 
operated upon by some special force in some special manner — 
thought having the same relation to the brain as bile has to the 
liver. 

What, then, do we make of ether ? It is either matter or not 
matter. Is it matter ? It has been calculated there are 1 1 ,000,000,000 
times more of it than of all other matter. It is infinitely elastic. 
It is wholly unaffected by gravity. It is omnipresent, through all, 
in all, with all. If ether be matter, then gravity, which operates by 
a fixed law on all matter with a force which diminishes as the 
square of the distance increases, gravity finds some matter every- 
where, matter which in bulk exceeds all other kinds of matter, and 
yet which is wholly free from its influence. 

If ether be not matter it is spirit, and we have an infinite omni- 
present spirit every-where invasive and pervasive. If ether be mat- 
ter, it is a God's body ; if not matter, it is a God's spirit. There is 
where we are all landed by science. 

No religious superstition involves greater contradictions than the 
doctrine of ether. I see some of them ; and yet I stand up here 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 209 

and solemnly and sincerely say, " Credo I I believe in a substantial 
medium filling all space, even that space which is occupied by 
other matter, while I believe that impenetrability is one of the es- 
sential qualities of matter ; and that, being vastly the larger part of 
all matter, ether lacks the essential qualities of all matter." And 
when I repeat this creed every man who desires to continue in the 
membership of the Catholic Church Scientific is bound to respond, 
" Amen." 

There is another superstition of science which we so firmly be- 
lieve that upon the baseless dream of our imagination we not only 
rest all of our scientific investigations, but also shape our practical 
lives. It is the superstitious belief in what is called " the uni- 
formity of nature ; " by which is meant the perpetual succession of 
physical events hereafter as we have observed them heretofore. 

Here is a belief in the future — in the future of forever ; a belief 
that all things in nature will continue so long as history can be 
made, and that they will continue in the order of recurrence and 
succession which they have exhibited so long as history has been 
made. The fact is, this proposition has been received as being an 
axiom ; but that this is not so is apparent from the fact that the 
opposite is not self-contradictory, whereas the opposites of axioms 
are always contradictory. We cannot conceive, for instance, in 
mathematics, of a whole which is less than any one of its parts, or 
of a part which is greater than the whole of which it is a part. Such 
a proposition contradicts the essence of its own terms. But we 
can think of a total suspension or destruction of gravitation ; we 
can think that there should be no sunrise on the morrow ; we can 
think of a total collapse of all the known forces of nature, and John 
Stuart Mill could think of a world in which the connection between 
cause and effect may not exist and in which two and two do not 
make four. 

Not only is the superstition of a continuance of the order of 
nature not self-evident, but there is absolutely no reason to be as- 
signed for it. The succession and recurrence with which we are 
familiar are due to no cause, or to some single cause, or to many 
causes. If they are due to no cause and are the mere products of 

chance, then there is no reason to believe that the same chance may 
14 



2io CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

not some day assume the condition of chaos as it now seems to retain 
the form of cosmos. But if they be due to causes, there is not a 
particle of evidence that the causes of the existing cosmos may not 
some day become the causes of the chaos. No matter how often 
any act or series of acts may have been repeated, we can get from 
this repetition no absolute assurance that it will not come to a 
close. It is just as reasonable to suppose that the millions of times 
in which succession of events has occurred may only have brought 
that succession nearer to its point of termination as to suppose that 
these repetitions give us ground to believe that they will be con- 
tinued. Indeed, the former is the more reasonable supposition, be- 
cause it is more consistent with what we know, or believe we know, 
of the past physical history of the universe. 

Take the case of our own planet. It is believed that at one time 
it consisted of mere vapor ; that at a second stage it was a hot 
liquid ; just at present, in its third stage, it is a cooling solid. Now, 
let us fancy that the planet, earth, when a mere inconceivably in- 
tensely heated mass of gas, had rational inhabitants. It was a long 
time in that condition. There might have been generation after 
generation of inhabitants of that world of gas. Let us fancy them 
observant, communicative, and remembering creatures, like ourselves. 
Let us fancy that they had had scientific men among themselves, 
as we have among us. Those earlier sons of gas might have gone 
back through a period longer than the historical era of the human 
race, and have appealed to certain phenomena like our rising and 
setting of the sun, like our seed-time and harvest, like our summer 
and winter, and they might have scouted as a superstition the belief 
that ever the planet would come to be a molten mass. Now we 
know, looking back, that these philosophers of the age of gas would 
have been resting their intellects on a superstition — a superstition 
as thoroughly such as if the inhabitants of the molten mass had be- 
lieved that all things would go on in the world for ever and ever just 
as things were going on in that molten mass. In their turn they 
might have scouted the idea of the planet solidifying to such a de- 
gree that the swirling waves of molten sea should be piled and fixed 
in Alpine peaks, and invisible gas condense to liquid water, and the 
liquid water harden to solid, rocky ice, such as makes the barriers of 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 211 

our polar regions. They would have argued that this was contrary 
to experience, and so could never occur ; and to believe that it 
ever would occur would have appeared to them to be as super- 
stitious as to believe in miracles. 

We readily perceive that those philosophers existent in the 
gaseous or molten planet were themselves subject to a scientific 
superstition. And yet this superstition is the belief of the science 
of this day, and is made the basis of the rejection of the Christian 
religion because of its teachings regarding miracles. Miracles are 
contrary to our experience, says Mr. Hume, and experience is the 
foundation of all our reason and conclusions concerning the rela- 
tion of cause and effect. But we perceive that there is nothing in 
the logical understanding to give any basis for our reliance upon 
our experience in regard to what belongs to the future, because we 
never have had, and cannot possibly ever have, any experience of 
the future. 

We freely admit, because we cannot fail to perceive, that our ex- 
perience and our science are in conflict. The experience of the 
rational beings now inhabiting the earth is that all things have 
continued as they were. We superstitiously conclude that all things 
will continue as they are. We conduct all our astronomical investi- 
gations and all our experimental tests and all our logical processes 
on this assumption, whereas our most trustworthy conclusions from 
these same investigations, tests and processes tear up the very basis 
on which they are erected. And this is shown in this way: 

Every year there is such radiation of heat into space as, while it 
is almost imperceptible in brief spaces of years, must, in process of 
time, so decrease the velocity of the earth's motion on its axis that 
the earth's day will become identical with the earth's year. A simi- 
lar thing actually occurred in the case of our moon, the rotation of 
which on its axis has become identical, as to time, w r ith its revolu- 
tion around the earth. What is true of the earth is true of the other 
planets. Many phenomena reveal the fact of perpetually dissi- 
pating dissipation, which we are taught must finally cause all the 
planets to fall into the sun. 

We also know that long before such a catastrophe could occur this 
planet may collide with others. We have never yet passed through 



212 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

the nucleus of a comet. We never may. Yet we may. It is sup- 
posed that more than once we have passed through the tails of 
comets. But we do not know of what a comet's nucleus is com- 
posed. We never may. The chance that we may make collision 
with any one comet is extremely small ; but who can tell the num- 
ber of comets? 

The apprehension from that quarter may be insignificant, but 
when we learn that very many of the comets have hyperbolic paths 
over measureless spaces our science teaches us that there must be 
dark bodies existing in those far-off spaces, bodies large or small, 
few or many, but probably multitudes. When the coasting mariner 
perceives a variation in the brightness which shoots over the dark 
sea from some light-house in which there is a rotating lamp he 
knows that between his eyes and the luminous flame in the pharos 
some dark body has intervened. When, sailing this illimitable 
ocean of space, the astronomic mariner lifts his telescope, he per- 
ceives stars the brightness of which has such variations that he 
calls them " periodic stars." What causes that variation ? He can- 
not tell. 

Around the far-off sun which we call a star there may be the 
revolution of some other star which cooled until its luminousness 
departed and left it dark on its orbit. At its normal rate of move- 
ment it would require tens of thousands of years for our sun to 
reach the nearest known star, but as he sweeps toward it, and carries 
our planet in his train, who can tell against what dark solid mass 
we may not dash in sudden and irremediable world-wreck? It is as 
if a ship at sea in darkest midnight, rushing forward under full head 
of steam, should drive against the logged hulk of an unknown 
steamer, the fires and lights of which had all become extinguished as 
in sea-troughs she rolled, rudderless. Science proves that possible. 

Again : Who knows what mass of hydrogen may lie along the 
path of our system into which sun and planets and satellites may all 
rush as that great mass of gas explodes, to involve the entire solar 
system in one instant in the most utter destruction ? Science proves 
that possible. 

Again : Who knows but that the sun itself may some day explode ? 
And who believes that if such a thing should occur our planet would 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



2I 3 



go forward in quiet orderliness and all things should continue as 
they have been ? 

If the Great Eastern, laden to her utmost capacity with nitro- 
glycerine, were sailing the seas in company with smaller crafts, and 
in a moment that whole mass of destructive material should explode 
and the vast ship be sent in splinters over the waters, do we believe 
that the silence of mid-ocean would remain amid that detonation as 
unbroken as it was before, and that all things on the small accom- 
panying crafts would continue as they were? Science sets before 
us as possible that this earth may perish by reason of some terrible 
solar explosion. 

Moreover, the smallest craft in the fleet we have imagined may 
carry in its hold that which, by reason of its confinement or from 
agencies set at work by the motion of the vessel, may explode and 
rend the vessel into fragments. Would all things after such an occur- 
rence continue as they were ? Science proves that the disruption 
of this planet from internal causes is far from being impossible. 

But, aside from any thought of a cataclysm which should be 
universal destruction, there is no assurance that the law of gravita- 
tion may not be changed or be abolished, nor that the law of reflec- 
tion may not be modified or abolished ; nor that the law of the cor- 
relation of forces may not be disturbed or totally abolished. The 
belief in the order of nature lies wholly outside the realm of ration- 
alism and entirely within the domain of superstition. I know that 
the proposition of the order of nature is not an axiom. I know 
that no one ever has proved it. I believe that no one ever can prove 
it. I am acquainted with no one who believes that it can ever be 
demonstrated. 

No religious superstition involves graver contradictions than the 
doctrine of the uniform order of nature ; I see some of them, and 
yet I stand up here and solemnly and sincerely say, " Credo ! I 
believe in the future continuation of that succession and recurrence 
of physical events of which men have had experience." And when 
I repeat this creed not only all the men who belong to the Catholic 
Church Scientific, but all other men who are capable of comprehend- 
ing this utterance, will feel bound to respond, " Amen." 

What, now, is the practical conclusion of the whole matter ? Shall 



214 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



we abandon our science because its fundamentals cannot be verified ? 
Shall we abandon logic because the " omne " and the " nullum " 
involve a universality which cannot be verified? Shall we abandon 
the atomic theory of the ultimate constitution of matter because 
the existence of atoms cannot be verified ? Shall we abandon the 
hypothesis of the existence of an infinitely fine and ethereal medium 
through which calorific and luminous rays are propagated because 
the existence of ether cannot be verified? Shall we abandon the 
dogma of uniformity in nature because the whole future, the nearest 
as completely as the most conceivable remote, is absolutely excluded 
from all human experience ? 

Nay, verily. Why not ? Simply because, whether we can prove 
them or not, we cannot do without them. Without the reception of 
the unverifiable in logic we cannot reason. Without the reception 
of the unverifiable in the material world we can have no physical 
science with all its rich results in mental culture and material 
advancement. Without the reception of the belief in the unverifi- 
able of the future we could have no practical life in the present. 
Reject all these superstitions, if you insist on calling them so, and 
you lie down to die as starved in intellect as you will be starved 
in body. The things verifiable are useful ; the things unverifiable 
are indispensable. 

When, then, we turn to another part of our nature, shall we starve 
out our souls by rejecting the unverifiable in the spiritual world ? 
A recent writer, Matthew Arnold, tells us in his preface to Literature 
and Dogma that we are to yield as untenable our belief in the exist- 
ence of an intelligent First Cause — that is, in God — because the 
hypothesis of such an existence cannot be verified ! But such a 
belief is the basis of all systems — and any system — of religion or 
morality. If for the reason assigned we must give up belief in God, 
give up belief in the juncture of the divine and human in Jesus for 
some purposes of atonement, give up the belief in the influences of 
the Holy Ghost, then we must give up all science, all systematic 
knowledge and human progress. 

No, we can give up neither these latter nor those former beliefs, 
because we cannot do without them. To abandon the former is to 
change the visible to the invisible ; to abandon the latter is to reduce 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 21$ 

the invisible to nothing. To him who is brought to such a state 
of mind time and eternity confront one another like sphinxes, be- 
tween whose faces of eternal reticence the forlorn unbeliever stands 
— a being capable of making both utter the noblest and divinest 
unverifiable truths, while in their silence he is born a puzzle and dies 
a riddle ! 

The fact is that man has in himself the double capacity of believ- 
ing on proof and of believing above proof. Faith and reason climb 
the ladder hand in hand until the topmost stand-point of the visible 
is reached, and there reason pauses, but faith goes on ; goes on and 
goes up ; not treading vacuity, but planting its footsteps on the rungs 
of a ladder invisible indeed, but just as existent and as strong as 
any thing which appears to sight. Reason cries out to faith, " Come 
down ;»you are in the region of superstition." It is true; there is 
something which stands above our reason ; there is something the 
existence of which can no more be made manifest to reason than 
the non-luminous rays of heat or the actinic solar ray can be made 
perceptible to the optic nerve. 

In England John Henry Newman and John Tyndall, in America 
John William Draper and John McCloskey, have all flourished. 
Two of these Johns were religious and two scientific ; but these four 
Johns were, all and singular, as superstitious as that greater John 
on whose blessed eyes broke the splendor of the apocalyptic vision 
on Patmos. 

And all these men believe — what you and I must believe — that 
there is something unverifiable which is not incredible. Man's faith 
seizes that which is above ; his reason touches that which is below. 
And, call it superstition or what you please, it is because man has faith 
that man has reason. The more tenaciously a man clings with the 
hands of his faith to the unseen things, which are unproved and 
unprovable, the more securely does he plant his feet on the things 
which are seen and are capable of verification. 



2l6 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



THE CRY OF CONFLICT. 

[When my late parishioner, the first Cornelius Vanderbilt, saw proper to set 
apart a portion of his great wealth for the establishment of a university it was 
mainly through the influence of his noble, beautiful, and now sainted wife that he 
determined to place it in Nashville, Tenn. One motive which was in her heart, 
and which undoubtedly had great influence with him, was the belief that such a 
benefaction of a Northern man to the South would assist in the restoration of good 
feeling. At his earnest desire I delivered the first address in its chapel, 1875. It 
is reprinted here from the pamphlet which contains the official report of the 
"dedication" and "inauguration." Governor Porter was in the chair. It was 
afterward delivered before the American Institute of Christian Philosophy.] 

Your Excellency, Mr. President of the Board of Trust, Mr. Chan- 
cellor, Gentlemen of the Faculties, Ladies and Gentlemen, God, 
the Father of lights and of spirits, knows how profoundly I feel the 
responsibility of making the opening address of the Vanderbilt 
University — an institution dear to me for many reasons ; an insti- 
tution which I hope will endure forever. Trusting in the God of 
nature and of grace, and resting on your friendly interpretation of 
all I shall say, I go forward. 

[Looking up, as in prayer, the speaker said :] 

" Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be 
acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my Redeemer." 

It has been thought fit that a minister of religion should make 
the first utterances at the opening of a school which professes to 
intend to teach what is known, and to stimulate research in every 
department of intellectual investigation. If, for a moment, any 
man could suppose that it would be proper to assign the initial 
speech to a teacher of religion as indicating that religion should 
take haughty and undue precedence of science, the thought would 
be most infelicitous. The present speaker would not assume any 
such position. It would misrepresent his convictions of the truth 
and his sense of the proprieties of the occasion. 

This recent cry of the " Conflict of Religion and Science " is fal- 
lacious, and mischievous to the interests of both science and religion, 
and would be most mournful if we did not believe that, in the very 
nature of things, it must be ephemeral. Its genesis is to be traced 
to the weak foolishness of some professors of religion and to the 
weak wickedness of some professors of science. No man of powerful 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 217 

and healthy mind, who is devout, ever has the slightest apprehen- 
sion that any advancement of science can shake the foundations of 
that faith which is necessary to salvation. No man of powerful and 
healthy mind, engaged in observing, recording, and classifying facts, 
and in searching among them for those identities and differences 
which point to principles and indicate laws, ever feels that he suffers 
any embarrassment or limitation in his studies by the most reverent 
love he can have for God as his Father, or the most tender sympa- 
thy he can have for man as his brother, or that hatred for sin which 
produces penitence, or that constant leaning of his heart on God 
which produces spiritual-mindedness, or that hope of a state of im- 
mortal holiness which has been the ideal of humanity in all ages. 

All this dust about " the conflict " has been flung up by men of 
insufficient faith, who doubted the basis of their faith ; or by men 
of insufficient science, who have mistaken theology or the Church 
for religion ; or by unreasonable and wicked men, who have 
sought to pervert the teachings of science so as to silence the 
voice of conscience in themselves, or put God out of their thoughts, 
so that a sense of his eternal recognition of the eternal difference 
between right and wrong might not overawe their spirits in the in- 
dulgence of the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride 
of life. It may be profitable to discriminate these ; and if badges 
and flags have become mixed in this fray it may be well to re-adjust 
our ensigns, so that foes shall strike at only foes. 

It is, first of all, necessary to settle distinctly what science is, as 
well as what it is not, and, also, what religion is, as well as what it 
is not. 

We can all afford to agree upon the definition rendered by the 
only man who has been found in twenty-two centuries to add any 
thing important to the imperial science of logic. Sir William Ham- 
ilton defines science as " a complement of cognitions, having in 
point of form the character of logical perfection, and in point of mat- 
ter the character of real truth." Under the focal heat of a defi- 
nition like this much that claims to be science will be consumed. 
It is the fashion to intimate, if not to assert, that it is much more 
easy to become scientific than to become religious ; that in one 
case a man is dealing with the real, in the other with the ideal ; in 



2i8 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

the one case with the comprehensible, in the other with the incom- 
prehensible ; in the one case with that which is certain and exact, 
and in the other case with that which at best is only probable and 
indefinite. 

There can be no doubt, among thoughtful men, of the great 
value of both science and religion. A thinker who is worth listen- 
ing to is always misunderstood if it be supposed that he means to 
disparage either. An attempt to determine the limits of religion is 
no disparagement thereof, because all the most religious men who 
are accustomed to think are engaged in striving to settle those 
limits, in order that they may have advantage of the whole territory 
of religion on the one hand, and on the other may not take that 
as belonging to religion which belongs to something else. 

Now, if Sir William Hamilton's definition is to be taken, we 
shall perceive that he represents science in its quality, in its 
quantity, and in its form. Cognition of something is necessary 
for science. Then (i) the knowledge of things known must be 
true ; (2) that knowledge must be full, and (3) it must be accurate ; 
it must be in such form as to be most readily and successfully used 
by the logical understanding for purposes of thought. 

This sets aside very much that has been called science, and, as it 
seems, perhaps nearly all that which has been the material used by 
those who have raised the most smoke over this " conflict " 
question. 

" Guesses at truth "are valuable only as the pecking at a plastered 
wall, to find where a wooden beam runs, is useful ; but a guess is 
not knowledge. A working hypothesis would not be to be despised, 
although the student of science might feel quite sure in advance 
that when he had learned the truth in this department he would 
throw the hypothesis away. A working hypothesis, like a scaffold, is 
useful ; but a scaffold is not a wall. Art is not science. Art deals 
with the appearances, science with the realities of things. Art deals 
with the external, science with the internal, of a thing ; art with the 
phenomenon, science with the noumenon. It must be the "real 
truth " which we know, and know truly. 

Weak men on both sides have done much harm — the weak relig- 
ionists by assuming, a,nd the weak scientists by claiming, for guesses 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 219 

and hypotheses the high character and full value of real truth. The 
guesses of both have collided in the air and a real battle seemed 
impending, but it was only " guesses " which exploded ; bubbles, 
not bombs ; and it is never to be forgotten that a professor of re- 
ligion has just as much right to guess as a professor of science, and 
the latter no more right than the former. 

No man can abandon a real truth without degradation to his in- 
tellectual and moral nature ; but Galileo, Kepler, and Newton in 
their studies from time to time employed and discarded theory 
after theory until they reached that which was capable of demon- 
stration. It was only that which took its place as science. In the 
case of Kepler it is known what great labor he spent in attempting 
to represent the orbit of Mars by combinations of uniform circular 
motion. His working hypothesis was the old doctrine of epicyclic 
curves. But his great labor was not fruitless, as has been carelessly 
asserted. The theory was false, and therefore not a part of real 
science ; but, working on it, he discovered that the orbit of Mars is 
an ellipse, and this led him to the first of his three great laws of 
planetary motion and enabled him almost immediately to discover 
the second. Here was a great intellect employing as a working 
hypothesis a theory which has always been false, and now is de- 
monstrably false. It was not science. 

Now if, while scientific men are employing working hypotheses 
merely as such, men representing religion fly at them as if they were 
holding those hypotheses as science, or if men representing science 
do set forth these hypotheses as if they were real knowledge and 
truth and proceed to defend them as such, then much harm is done 
in all directions. 

In the first instance, the religious man shows an impatience 
which is irreligious. " He that believeth shall not make haste." 
It is unfair to criticise any man while he is doing. Let him do 
what he will do ; then criticise the deed. The artist has laid one 
pigment on his palette, and he is criticised before it is known what 
others he intends to mix with it, to procure what shade, to produce 
what effect. Wait until all the paint is on the canvas and the 
artist has washed his brushes and drawn the curtain from his 
picture ; then criticise the picture. 



220 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

This impatient and weak criticism on the part of religious men is 
injurious to scientific progress, as well as to the progress of religion. 
For the latter, it makes the reputation of unfairness ; for the former, 
it does one of two bad things : it obstructs free discussion among 
students of science or pushes them into a foolish defiance of relig- 
ion. Men must co-work with those of their own sphere of intel- 
lectual labors. They must publish guesses, conjectures, hypotheses, 
theories. Whatever comes into any mind must be examined by 
many minds. It may be true, it may be false ; there must be no 
prejudgment. Now if, because our scientific men are discussing a 
new view, our religious men fly among them and disturb them by 
crying " heresy," " infidelity," " atheism," those .students must take 
time to repel the charges, and thus their work be hurt. If let 
alone they may soon abandon their false theory. Certainly, if a 
proposition in science be false, the students of science are the men 
likeliest to detect the falsehood, however unlikely they may be to 
discover the truth that is in religion. Nothing more quickly de- 
stroys an error than to attempt to establish it scientifically. 

The premature cries of the religious against the scientific have 
also the effect of keeping a scientific error longer alive. Through 
sheer obstinacy the assailed will often hold a bad position, which, if 
not attacked, had been long ago abandoned. And we must have 
noticed that nature seems quite as able to make scientific men ob- 
stinate as grace to do this same work for the saints. 

No man should be charged with being an atheist who does not, 
in distinct terms, announce himself to be such ; and in that case 
the world will believe him to be too pitiful a person to be worth 
assailing with hard words. But as you may drive a man away 
from you by representing him as your enemy, so a scientific man 
may be driven from the Christian faith if convinced that the Chris- 
tian faith stands in the way of free investigation and free discussion ; 
or, he may hold on to the faith because he has brains enough to see 
that one may be most highly scientific and most humbly devout at 
the same time ; but by persecution he may be compelled to with- 
draw from open communion with " those who profess and call them- 
selves Christians." Then both parties lose — what neither can well 
afford to lose — the respect and help which each could give the other. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 221 

When the son of a religious teacher turns to the work of a man 
whom he has heard that father denounce, and finds in any one page 
of those books more high religious thought than in a hundred of 
his father's commonplace discourses, a sad state of feeling is pro- 
duced, and many mistakes are likely to follow. 

Sir William Hamilton's definition of science has for genus " a 
complement of cognitions," and for differentia " logical perfection 
of form," and " real truth of matter." The definition is a demand 
for a certain fullness. We can only conjecture, in the case of any 
particular science, how much knowledge such a man as Sir William 
Hamilton would regard as a " complement." But students of science 
do well to remind themselves that it is impossible to exceed, and 
very difficult to succeed, and the easiest thing imaginable to fall 
short. In other words, that we have never been able to collect 
more material of knowledge than the plan of any temple of science 
could work in, and really demanded for the completion of the 
structure ; and that very few temples of science have been finished, 
even in the outline, while all the plain of thought is covered with 
ruins of buildings begun by thinkers, but unfinished for want of 
more knowledge. Even where there has been gathered a sufficient 
amount of knowledge to be wrought by the logical understanding 
into the form of a science, so that such a mind as Hamilton's would 
admit it as a science — that is, a sufficient complement of cognitions 
of truths put in logical form — another age of labor, in other depart- 
ments, would so shrink this science that, in order to hold its rank, 
it would have to work in the matter of more knowledge, and, to 
preserve its symmetry, be compelled to readjust its architectural 
outlines. In other words, what is science to one age may not be 
science to its successor, because that successor may perceive that, 
although its matter had the character of real truth, and its form the 
character of logical perfection, as far as it went, nevertheless there 
were not enough cognitions ; not enough, just because in the later 
age it was possible to obtain additional cognitions which could not 
have been obtained earlier. 

And, in point of fact, has not this been the history of each of the 
acknowledged sciences ? And can any significance be assigned to 
Sir William Hamilton's definition without taking the word " com- 



222 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

plement " to mean all the cognitions possible at the time f Now, un- 
less at one time men have more cognitions of any subject than at 
another time, one of two things must be true: either (i) no new 
phenomena will appear in that department, or (2) no abler observer 
will arise. But the history of the human mind in the past renders 
both suppositions highly improbable. If new phenomena appear 
we shall have observers abler than have existed, because, although 
it were granted that no fresh accessions of intellectual power came 
to the race, each new generation of observers would have increased 
ability, because each would have the aid of the instruments and 
methods of all predecessors. When we go back to consider the 
immense labor performed by Kepler, in his investigations which 
led to his brilliant discoveries, we feel that if his nerves had given 
way, under his labors and domestic troubles and financial cares, or 
his industry had been just a little less tenacious, he would have 
failed in the prodigious calculations which led him to his brilliant 
discoveries and gave science such a great propulsion. Just five 
years after the publication of Kepler's New Astronomy the Laird of 
Merchistoun published, in Scotland, his Mirifici Logarithmorum Can- 
onis Descriptio. If Kepler had only had Napier's logarithms ! But 
succeeding students have enjoyed this wonderful instrumental aid, 
and done great mental work with less draught on their vital energies. 
The very facts, then, which make us proud of modern science 
should make scientific men very humble. It will be noticed that 
the most arrogant cultivators of science are those who are most 
ready to assail such religious men as are rigid, and hold that noth- 
ing can be added to or taken away from theology ; and such scien- 
tific men make this assault on the assumption that physical sciences 
are fixed, certain, and exact. How ridiculous they make them- 
selves a review of the history of any science for the last fifty years 
would show. Is there any department of physical science in which 
a text-book used a quarter of a century ago would now be put into 
the hands of any student? The fact is that any man who is careful 
of his reputation has some trepidation in issuing 2 volume on 
science, lest the day his publishers announce his book the morning 
papers announce, also, a discovery which knocks the bottom out of 
all his arguments. This shows the great intellectual activity of the 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 223 

age — a matter to rejoice in — but it should also promote humility and 
repress egotism in all well-ordered minds. There is, probably, no one 
thing known in all its properties and accidents, in all its relations to 
all abstract truths and concrete existence. No one thing is exactly 
and thoroughly known by any man or by all men. Mr. Herbert 
Spencer well says: " Much of what we call science is not exact, 
and some of it, as physiology, can never become exact." {Recent 
Discussions, p. 158.) He might have made the remark with greater 
width and no less truth, since every day accumulates proof that 
that department of our knowledge which we call the exact 
sciences holds a small, and diminishing, proportion to the whole 
domain of science. 

There is one important truth which seems often ignored, and 
which should frequently be brought to our attention ; namely, that 
the propositions which embody our science are statements, not 
of absolute truths, but of probabilities. Probabilities differ. There 
is that which is merely probable, and that which is more probable, 
and that which is still more probable, and that which is so probable 
that our faculties cannot distinguish between this probability and 
absolute certainty ; and so we act on it as if it were certain. But it 
is still only a " probability," and not a " certainty." It seems as 
though it would forever be impossible for us to determine how near 
a probability can approach a certainty without becoming identical 
with that certainty. 

Is not all life a discipline of determining probabilities ? It would 
seem that God intends that generally the certainties shall be known 
only to himself. He has probably shown us a very few certainties, 
more for the purpose of furnishing the idea than for any practical 
purpose, as absolute certainty is necessary for him, while probabili- 
ties are sufficient for us. All science is purely a classification of 
probabilities. 

We do not know that the same result will follow the same act in 
its several repetitions, but believe that it will ; and we believe it so 
firmly that if a professor had performed a successful experiment 
before a class in chemistry he would not hesitate to repeat the ex- 
periment after a lapse of a quarter of a century. Scientific men are 
not infidels. Of no men may it be more truly said that they " walk 



224 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

by faith." They do not creep ; they march. Their tread is on 
made ground ; on probabilities; but they believe they shall be sup- 
ported, and according to their faith so is it done unto them. 

And no men better know than truly scientific men that this 
probability can never become certainty. In the wildest dreams of 
fanaticism — and there are fanatics in the laboratory, as there are in 
the sanctuary of God and in the temple of mammon — it has never 
been believed that there shall come a man who shall know all 
things that are, all things that have been, all things that shall be, 
and all things that can be, in their properties, their attributes and 
their relations. Until such a man shall arise science must always be 
concerned with the cognition of that which is the real truth as to 
probabilities, or with probable cognitions of that which is not only 
real truth, but absolute truth. A scientific writer, then, when he 
states that any proposition has been " proved," or any thing 
" shown," means that it has been proved probable to some minds, 
or shown to some — perhaps to all — intelligent persons as probable. 
If he have sense and modesty he can mean no more, although he 
does not cumber his pages or his speech with the constant repetition 
of that which is to be presumed ; even as a Christian in making his 
appointments does not always say, Deo volente, because it is under- 
stood that a Christian is a man always seeking to do what he thinks 
to be the will of God, in submission to the providence of God. 

A scientific man ridicules the idea of any religious man claiming 
to be " orthodox." It must be admitted to be ridiculous, just as 
ridiculous as the claim of a scientific man to absolute certainty and 
unchangeableness for science. The more truly religious a man is 
the more humble he is ; the more he sees the deep things of God 
the more he sees the shallow things of himself. He claims nothing 
positively. He certainly does not make that most arrogant of all 
claims, the claim to the prerogative of infinite intelligence. There 
can exist only one Being in the universe who is positively and ab- 
solutely orthodox, and that is God. In religion, as in science, we 
walk by faith — that is, we believe in the probabilities sufficiently 
to act upon them. 

So far from any conflict being between science and religion their 
bases are the same, their modes are similar, and their ends are 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 2 2$ 

identical ; namely, what all life seems to be — that is, a discipline of 
faith. 

It is not proper to despise knowledge however gained : whether 
from the exercise of the logical understanding, or from conscious- 
ness, or from faith ; and these are the three sources of our knowl- 
edge. That which has been most undervalued is the chief of the 
three — that is, faith. 

We believe before we acquire the habit of studying and analyzing 
our consciousnesses. We believe before we learn how to conduct the 
processes of our logical understanding. 

We can have much knowledge by our faith without notice of our 
consciousness and without exertion of our reasoning faculties ; but 
we can have no knowledge without faith. We can learn nothing 
from our examination of any consciousness without faith in some 
principle of observation, comparison, and memory. We can ac- 
quire no knowledge by our logical understanding without faith in 
the laws of mental operations. 

This last statement, if true, places all science on the same basis 
with religion. Although so familiar to many minds we may take 
time to show that it is true. 

For proof let us go to a science which is supposed to demonstrate 
all its propositions, and examine a student in geometry. We will 
not call him out on the immortal 47. 1. of Euclid. We can learn 
all we need from a bright boy who has been studying Euclid a week. 
The following may represent our colloquy : 

" Q. Do you know how many right angles may be made by one 
straight line upon one side of another straight line ? 

" A. Yes ; two, and only two. Innumerable angles may be made 
by two straight lines so meeting, but the sum of all the possible 
angles will be two right angles. 

" Q. You say you know that. How do you know that you 
know it ? 

" A. Because I can prove it. A man knows every proposition 
which he can demonstrate. 

" Q. Please prove it to me." 

The student draws the well-known diagrams. If he follows 

Euclid he begins with an argument like this : 
15 



226 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

" A. There are obviously two angles made when a straight line 
stands on another straight line. 

" O. My eyes show me that. 

" A. Well, then, those angles are either two right angles or, 
together, are equal to two right angles. And I prove that in this 
way : If the two angles made by the lines be equal, each is a right 
angle according to the definition of a right angle, which may be 
stated thus: A right angle is one of the two angles made by a 
straight line on one side of another straight line when both angles 
are equal. If each is a right angle, and there are only two, because 
they have taken all the space on that side of the line, it is proved 
that two right angles are made by two lines in the relation sup- 
posed, and only two." 

But if each be not a right angle our young friend proceeds, by 
the well-known demonstration of Euclid, to show that the sum of 
the two angles is equal to two right angles ; and when he has 
finished, and reached the Q. E. D., he and his examiners knoiv that 
the proposition is true, because he has proved it. But when we ex- 
amine his argument we find that he has made three unproved as- 
sumptions ; namely, (i) that a thing cannot at the same time be and 
not be ; (2) that if equals be added to equals the wholes are equal ; 
and (3) that things which are equal to the same are equal to one 
another. It so happens that each of these propositions which he 
has assumed to be true is, if true, much more important than the 
proposition which he has proved. Let us point out these three as- 
sumptions to our bright student, and then resume our catechism. 

" O. Could you possibly prove this proposition in geometry if 
any one of those three assumed propositions were not granted? 

"A. No. 

" Q. Then, if we deny these assumptions, can you prove them ? 

" A. No ; but can you deny them ? 

" Q. No, we cannot deny them, and cannot prove them ; but we 
believe them, and therefore have granted them to you for argu- 
ment, and know your proposition of the two right angles to be true, 
because you have proved it." 

Now, here is the proposition which Euclid selected as the sim- 
plest of all demonstrable theorems of geometry, in the demonstra- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



227 



tion of which the logical understanding of a student cannot take the 
first step without the aid of faith. 

From the student let us go to the master. We go to such a teacher 
as Euclid, and in the beginning he requires us to believe three 
propositions, without which there can be no geometry, but which 
have never been proved, and, in the nature of things, it would seem 
never could be proved ; namely, that space is infinite in extent, 
that space is infinitely divisible, and that space is infinitely continu- 
ous. And we believe them, and use that faith as knowledge, and 
no more distrust it than we do the results of our logical understand- 
ings, and are obliged to admit that geometry lays its broad founda- 
tions on our faith. 

Now, geometry is the science which treats of forms in their 
relations in space. The value of such a science for intellectual 
culture and practical life must be indescribably important, as might 
be shown in a million of instances. No form can exist without 
boundaries, no boundaries without lines, no line without points. 
The beginning of geometric knowledge, then, lies in knowing what 
a " point " is, the existence of forms depending, it is said, upon 
the motion of points. The first utterance of geometry, therefore, 
must be a definition of a point. And here it is : " A point is that 
which has no parts, or which has no magnitude." At the threshold 
of this science we meet with a mystery. "A point is" — then, it 
has existence — " is " what ? In fact, in form, in substance, it is 
nothing. A logical definition requires that the genus and differentia 
shall be given. What is the genus of a "point?" Position, of 
course. Its differentia is plainly seen. It is distinguished from 
every thing else in this : that every thing else is something somewhere, 
and a point is nothing somewhere ; every thing HAS some character- 
istic, a point has none. A point is visible or invisible. Is it visible? 
Then we can see that which is without parts or magnitude. What 
is it we see when we do not see any part, do not see any magnitude ? 
Is it substantial or ideal ? If substantial, how do we detect its 
substantial existence? If ideal, how can an idea have motion, and 
by simple motion become a substantial existence ? Are we 
not reduced to this : Ideals produce substantiate ; or invisible sub- 
stantiate, upon motion, produce visible substantiate : or that which 



228 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

is necessary to matter — namely, form — owes its existence to that 
which is neither substantial nor ideal — to nothing, in fact. The 
entire and sublime science of geometry, at one time the only in- 
strument of culture among the Greeks, and so esteemed by Plato 
that he is said to have written over his door, " Let no one enter 
here who does not know geometry," in all its conceptions, propo- 
sitions, and demonstrations, rests upon the conception of that which 
has no parts, no magnitude. The old saw of the school-men was, 
" Ex nihilo nihil fit." If each visible solid owes its form to super- 
ficies, and each superficies its form to lines, and each line its form to 
a point — and a point has no form, because it has no parts — then, 
who shall stone the man that cries out, "Ex nihilo geometria fit f" 

But lay the first three definitions of geometry side by side : I. " A 
point is that which has no parts, or which has no magnitude." 2. 
" A line is length without breadth." 3. " The extremities of a line 
are points." Study these, and you will probably get the following 
results : That which has no parts produces all the parts of that 
which occupies space without occupying space, and which, although 
it occupies no space, has extremities, to the existence of which it 
owes its own existence ; and those extremities determine the ex- 
istence of that which has parts made up of multiplications of its 
extremities which have no parts. Now, you must know at least 
that much, or else stay out of Plato's house. 

This useful science, without which men could not measure 
their little plantations, or construct their little roads on earth, 
much less traverse and triangulate the ample fields of the skies, lays 
for its necessary foundation thirty-five definitions, three postulates, 
and twelve axioms, the last being propositions which no man has 
ever proved ; and these fifty sentences contain as much that is in- 
comprehensible, as much that must be granted without being 
proved, as much that must be believed although it cannot be 
proved, as can be found in all the theological and religious writings 
from those of John Scotus Erigena down to those of Richard Wat- 
son, of England, or Charles Hodge, of Princeton. 

Does any man charge that this is a mere logical juggle ? Then he 
shall be called upon to point out wherein it differs from the meth- 
ods of those who strive to show that there is a real conflict between 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 229 

real science and real religion. If any man shall charge me with 
being an infidel as touching geometry, and try to turn me out of 
the church of science, I shall become hotly indignant, because I 
know that Euclid did not believe more in geometry than I do, and I 
believe as much in the teachings of geometry as I do in the teach- 
ings of theology, regarding them both, as Aristotle did, as mere 
human sciences, ranking theology with psychology, geology, and 
botany. And, being by profession a theologian, I certainly believe 
in theology. 

And this brings us back to what was stated in the beginning, as 
one of the causes of this cry of "conflict." It is the confounding 
of theology with religion. Theology is not religion any more than 
psychology is human life, or zoology is animal life, or botany is 
vegetable life. Theology is a human science ; religion is a real life. 
Theology is objective ; religion is subjective. Theology is the sci- 
entific classification of what is known of God ; religion is a loving 
obedience to God's commandments. Every religious man must 
have some theology, but it does not follow that every theologian 
must have some religion. We never knew a religious man without 
some kind of a theology, nor can we conceive such a case. But we 
do know some theologians who have little religion, and some that 
seem to have none. There may be a conflict between theology and 
some other sciences, and religious men may deplore that conflict, or 
may not, according to their measure of faith. There are those 
whose faith is so large and strong that they do not deplore such a 
conflict, because they know that if, for instance, a conflict should 
come between geology and theology, and geology should be beaten, 
it will be so much the better for religion ; and if geology should beat 
theology, still so much the better for religion : according to the spirit 
of the old Arabic adage, If the pitcher fall on the stone, so much the 
worse for the pitcher ; and if the stone fall on the pitcher, so much 
the worse for the pitcher. Geologists, psychologists, and theologists 
must all ultimately promote the cause of religion, because they must 
confirm one another's truths, and explode one another's errors ; and 
a religious man is a man whose soul longs for the truth, who loves 
truth because he loves God, who knows if the soul be sanctified it 
must be sanctified by the truth, even as the mind must be enlarged 



230 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



and strengthened by the truth. He knows and feels that it would 
be as irreligious in him to reject any truth found in nature as it 
would be for another to reject any truth found in the Bible. 

But there is no necessary conflict between even theology and any 
other science. Theology has to deal with problems into which the 
element of the infinite enters. It will therefore have concepts some 
two of which will be irreconcilable, but not therefore contradictory. 
For instance, to say that God is " an infinite person " is to state the 
agreement of two concepts which the human mind is supposed never 
to have reconciled, and never to be able to reconcile. But they are 
not contradictory. If one should say that there is in the universe 
a circular triangle, we should deny it, not because the concept of a 
triangle is irreconcilable with the concept of a circle, as consistent 
in the same figure, which is quite true, but because they are con- 
tradictory. What is irreconcilable to you may be reconcilable to 
another mind, because " irreconcilable " indicates the relation of 
the concept to the individual intellect ; but what is contradictory 
to the feeblest is contradictory to the mightiest mind, because " con- 
tradictory " represent: the relation of the concepts to one another. 

In the definition of a person there is nothing to exclude infinity, 
and in the definition of infinite there is nothing to exclude person- 
ality. There is no more exclusion between " person " and " infinite " 
than between " line " and " infinite ; " and yet Ave talk of infinite lines, 
knowing the irreconcilability of the ideas, but never regarding them 
as contradictory. 

Writers of great ability sometimes fall into this indiscrimination. 
For instance, a writer whom I greatly admire, Dr. Hill, former 
President of Harvard College, in one paragraph in The Uses of 
MatJiesis seems twice to employ " contradictory " in an illogical 
sense, even when he is presenting an illustration which goes to 
show most clearly that in other sciences, as well as in theology, 
there are propositions which we cannot refuse to accept, because 
they are not contradictory, although they are irreconcilable ; in 
other words, that there are irreconcilable concepts which are not 
contradictory, for we always reject one or the other of two contra- 
dictory concepts or propositions. 

That is so striking an illustration of the mystery of the infinite 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 23 1 

that I will reproduce it. On a plane imagine a fixed line, pointing 
north and south. Intersect this at an angle of ninety degrees by 
another line, pointing east and west. Let this latter rotate at the 
point of intersection, and at the beginning be a foot long. At each 
approach of the rotating line toward the stationary line let the 
former double its length. Let each approach be made by bisecting 
the angle. At the first movement the angle would be forty-five 
degrees and the line two feet in length ; at the second, the angle 
twenty-two and one-half degrees and the line four feet ; at the 
third, the angle eleven and one-fourth degrees and the line eight 
feet ; at the fourth, the angle five and five-eighths degrees and the 
line sixteen feet ; at the fifth, the angle two and thirteen-sixteenths 
degrees and the line thirty-two feet, and so on. Now, as this bi- 
secting of the angle can go on indefinitely before the rotating line 
can touch the stationary line at all its points, it follows that before 
such contact the rotating line will have a length which cannot be 
stated in figures, and which defies all human computation. It can 
be mathematically demonstrated that a line so rotating, and increas- 
ing its length in the inverse ratio of its angle with the meridian, 
will have its end always receding from the meridian and approaching 
a line parallel to the meridian at a distance of 1.5708. We can 
show that the rotating line can cross the stationary line by making 
it do so as on a watch-dial, and yet we can demonstrate that if it be 
extended indefinitely it can never touch the stationary line, nor 
come at the end even as near as eighteen inches to it. 

Here are two of the simplest human conceptions, between which 
we know that there is no contradiction, rendered absolutely irrecon- 
cilable to the human intellect by the introduction of the infinite. 
There is no religion here. And yet there is no mystery in either 
theology or religion more mysterious than the mystery of the infi- 
nite, which we may encounter whenever we attempt to set our 
watches to the right time if they have run more than an hour 
wrong. 

Another error has been the occasion of this cry of "conflict." It 
is the confounding of " the Church" with "religion." This confu- 
sion has led many an honest soul astray, and is the fallacy where- 
with shrewd sophists have been able to overthrow the faith of the 



232 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

ignorant. If the Church — and, in all my treatment of this topic, I 
must be understood as using " the Church " not as signifying " the 
holy church universal," but simply in the sense in which antagonistic 
scientists employ it — if the Church and religion be the same, the 
whole argument must be given up, and it must be admitted that 
there is a conflict between religion and science, and that religion is 
in the wrong. Churchmen are guilty of helping to strengthen, if 
indeed they are not responsible for creating, this error. It has at 
length been presented plumply to the world in the book of Professor 
John William Draper, entitled a History of the Conflict between Re- 
ligion and Science. The title assumes that there is such a conflict. 
See how it will read with synonyms substituted : " History of the 
Conflict between Loving Obedience to God's Word and Intelligent 
Study of God's Works." Does Dr. Draper believe there is such a 
conflict? It is not to be supposed that he does. How, then, did 
he come to give his book such a title? From a confusion of terms, 
as will be observed by the perusal of three successive sentences in 
his preface : " The papacy represents the ideas and aspirations of 
two thirds of the population of Europe. It insists on a political 
supremacy, . . . loudly declaring that it will accept no reconciliation 
with modern civilization. The antagonism we thus witness between 
religion and science," etc. Now, if the " papacy " and " religion " 
be synonymous terms, representing equivalent ideas, Dr. Draper's 
book shows that all good men should do what they can to extir- 
pate religion from the world ; but if they are not — and they are 
not — then the book is founded on a most hurtful fallacy, and 
must be widely mischievous. Their share of the responsibility for 
the harm done must fall to churchmen. 

No, these are not synonymous terms. " The Church " is not re- 
ligion, and religion is not " the Church." There may be a church 
and no religion ; there may be religion and no church, as there may 
be an aqueduct without water, and there may be water without an 
aqueduct. God makes water, and men make aqueducts. Water 
was before aqueducts, and religion before churches. God makes 
religion, and men make churches. There are irreligious men in 
every church, and there are very religious men in no church. Any 
visible, organized church is a mere human institution. It is useful 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 233 

for the purpose of propagating religion so long as it confines itself 
to that function and abstains from all other things. The moment it 
transcends that limit it is an injurious institution. In either case it 
is merely human, and we wrong both religion and the Church when 
we claim for the latter that it is not a human institution. The 
Church of England is as much a human institution as the Royal 
Society ; and the same may be said of the Church of Rome and the 
Royal Florentine Academy. A Church is as much an authority in 
matters of religion as a society is in matters of science, and no more. 
" The Church " has often been opposed to science, and so it has to 
religion, but "the society" has often been opposed to religion, and 
so it has to science. " The Church," both before and since the days 
of Christ, has stood in opposition to the Bible, the text-book of 
Jewish and Christian religionists, quite as often as it has to science. 
But "the society," or "the academy," has stood in opposition to 
science quite as often as it has to religion. Sometimes the sin of 
one has been laid upon the other, and sometimes the property of 
one has been scheduled as the assets of the other. It is time to 
protest, in the interests of the truth of God, and in the name of the 
God of truth, that religion no longer be saddled with all the faults of 
the churchmen, all the follies of the scientists, and all the crimes of 
the politicians. It was not religion which brought Galileo to his 
humiliating retraction, about which we hear so much declamation ; 
it was " the Church." 

But why should writers of the history of science so frequently 
conceal the fact that " the Church" was instigated thereunto not by 
religious people, but scientific men — by Galileo's collator at eurs ? It 
was the jealousy of the scientists which made use of the bigotry of 
the churchmen to degrade a rival in science. They began their 
attacks not on the ground that religion was in danger, but on such 
scientific grounds as these — stated by a professor in the University 
of Padua — namely, that as there were only seven metals, and seven 
days in the week, and seven apertures in man's head, there could be 
only seven planets ! And that was some time before these gentle- 
men of science had instigated the sarcastic Dominican monk to at- 
tempt to preach Galileo down under the text, Viri Galilcei, quid 
statis adspicientes in caelum f 



234 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

In like manner politicians have used "the Church" to overthrow 
their rivals. "The Church " is the engine which has been turned 
against freedom, against science, against religion. It would be as 
logical and as fair to lay all " the Church's " outrages against human 
rights and intellectual advancement at the door of religion as it 
would be to lay all its outrages against religion at the door of sci- 
ence and government, because "the Church" has seldom slaughtered 
a holy martyr to the truth without employing some forms of both 
law and logic. 

Science exists for the sake of religion and because of religion. 
If there had been no love for God in the human race there had 
been no study of the physical universe. The visible cosmos is 
God's love-letter to man ; and religion seeks to probe every corner of 
the sheet on which such love is written, to examine every phrase 
and study every connection. A few upstarts of the present day, 
not the real men and masters of science, ignore the fact that almost 
every man who has made any great original contribution to science, 
since the revival of letters, was a very religious man ; but their 
weak wickedness must not be charged to science any more than the 
wicked weakness of ecclesiastics to religion. 

Copernicus (born 1473), who revolutionized astronomy, was one of 
the purest Christians who ever lived — a simple, laborious minister 
of religion, walking beneficently among the poor by day, and living 
among the stars by night ; and yet one writer of our day has dared 
to say, in what he takes to be the interest of science, that Coper- 
nicus was " aware that his doctrines were totally opposed to revealed 
truth. " Was any thing worse ever perpetrated by theologian or 
even ecclesiastic? Could any man believe in any doctrine which he 
knew was opposed to any truth, especially if he believed that God 
had revealed that truth? It were impossible, especially with a man 
having the splendid intellect and the pure heart of Copernicus, who 
died believing in his " De Orbium Ccelestium Revolutionists " and 
also in the Bible. And this is the inscription which that humble 
Christian ordered for his tomb : " Non parent Paulo veniam requiro, 
gratiam Petri neque posco / sed quam i?t crucis ligno dederis latroni } 
sedulus oro" 

Tycho Brahe (born 1546), who, although he did not produce a 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



235 



system which won acceptance, did, nevertheless, lay the foundation 
for practical astronomy and build the stairs on which Kepler 
mounted to his grand discoveries, was a most religious man. He 
introduces into one of his scientific works (Astronomic? Instaiiratio 
Mechanica, p. A) this sentence : " No man can be made happy and 
enjoy mortal life but through the merits of Christ, the Redeemer, 
the Son of God, and by the study of his doctrines and imitation of 
his example." 

John Kepler (born 1571) was a man in whose life the only conflict 
between science and religion seemed to be as to which should yield 
the most assistance to the other. He wrought as under Luther's 
motto, " Orasse est studisse." He prayed before he worked, and 
shouted afterward. The more he bowed his soul in prayer the 
higher his intellect rose in its discoveries; and as those discoveries 
thickened on his head it bowed in humbler adoration. And so that 
single man was able to do more for science than all the irreligious 
scientists of the last three centuries have accomplished, while he 
bore an appalling load of suffering w T ith a patience that was sublime, 
and, dying, left this epitaph for his tombstone : "In Christ pie obiit" 

Of Sir Isaac Newton's, and Michael Faraday's, and Sir William 
Hamilton's, and Sir James Y. Simpson's religious life, not to men- 
tion the whole cloud of witnesses, we need not tell what is known 
to all men. But the history of science shows that not the most gifted, 
not the most learned, not the most industrious, gain the loftiest 
vision, but that only the pure in heart see God. And all true sci- 
ence is a new sight of God. 

Herbert Spencer says: "Science may be called an extension of 
the perceptions by means of reasoning." (Recent Discussions, p. 60.) 
And we may add, Religion may be called an extension of the per- 
ceptions by means of faith. And, having so said, have we not para- 
phrased Paul?' " Faith is confidence in things hoped for, conviction 
of things not seen." (Heb. xi, 1.) Science has the finite for its 
domain, religion the infinite ; science deals with the things seen, 
and religion with the things not seen. When Dr. Hutton, of Edin- 
burgh, announced, in the last century, " In the economy of the 
world I can find no traces of a beginning, no prospect of an end," 
it is said that scientific men were startled and religious men were 



236 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

shocked. Why should they be? The creation of the universe and 
its end are not questions of science, and can be known only as 
revealed to faith. And so Paul says: " Through faith we apprehend 
intellectually that the worlds have been framed by the word of 
God, so that that which is seen may have sprung from that which is 
not seen." (Heb. xi. 3.) 

But we must close. 

While preparing this address it has been my almost daily custom 
to pass the massive Masonic Temple recently erected in the city of 
New York. Before its portals stand two stately columns, known to 
the brethren of the Masonic Order as Jachin and Boaz. On each 
rests a globe. In going to my study in the morning I pass first the 
column which supports the celestial globe, and as I return to my 
home in the evening I pass first the column which supports the 
terrestrial globe. One day it came to me that here there stood, in 
solid symmetry and solemn resemblance, the symbols of these twins 
of God, who did not struggle in the infinite womb as Isaac's sons 
contended before they were born, and whose children should not 
fight on the fields of the finite as the descendants of Jacob and 
Esau have contended for inheritances which are corruptible and 
which pass away. 

The most sacred thing in the " sanctum sanctorum " of the ancient 
Hebrew tabernacle and temple was the Ark of the Covenant — the 
law; God's testimony to his sense of right; the solitary autograph 
in human letters of the Eternal, written on stone, inscribed by the 
very fingers of the Lord God Almighty. Over the ark which held 
the law God ordered that a mercy-seat should be placed. " His 
tender mercies are over all his works," and so his mercy-seat 
covered his testimony. When Adam and Eve had been driven 
forth the cherubim had stood at Eden's gate, while a flaming sword 
turned every way. They were placed there as guardians to keep 
the way of the tree of life. In the tabernacle the cherubim re- 
appear, but come without the sword ; stretching forth their wings on 
high, covering the mercy-seat with their wings, and gazing down on 
the awful mystery of love overlapping law, and law upholding love. 

Behold, I have a vision of the cherubim. 

The Ark is carried into the temple not made with hands, eternal 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 237 

in the heavens. The cherubim are instinct with life to the outer- 
most tip of each mighty pinion. The very glory of God descends 
to make his everlasting throne upon the everlasting mercy-seat, 
which covers the everlasting seat of law. Before the infinite 
majesty of that glory the cherubim arise and stand in front of 
God, and as they arise the sounds of their quivering wings are 
heard to the outer court of all the temple of the universe, as the 
voice of the Almighty God when he speaketh. 

See how they stand, so vast and so superb ! 

The one who has the place by the right hand of the Omnipotent 
lifts up himself, and all the glory of all the suns is on his brow, and 
each great wing is like an unmeasured milky-way, a-shimmer with 
the mystic splendor of all stars. 

The one who has the place nearest the infinite heart of Immortal 
Love lifts up himself. His brow is fairer than the light of that 
morning when all the sons of God shouted for joy. His eyes are 
lovelier than the sapphired tent that pavilions the eternal throne. 
His lips are ravishingly sweet with the best beauty that comes from 
the kisses of the Lord. His wings are pinions whose plumes of 
whiteness shed thoughts of purity down on angelic minds, and whose 
immense sweep fans all the love-flames glowing in seraphic hearts. 

Twain they stand, and twain they turn, until hierarchic circles 
kindle into rapture at the sight. Even God delights himself in their 
surpassing glory and smiles upon them until their vast hearts can 
no longer hold their divinest joy. 

Twain they sing. The cherub of the snow-white wings and 
palpitating heart breaks heaven's ecstatic silence with the chant, 
"Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts!" 

The cherub of the starry wings and throbbing brain gives anti- 
phone, " Heaven and earth are full of the majesty of thy glory." 

The heavens can keep silence no more, but seraphim and cheru- 
bim, angels and archangels, shout, shout up at the throne of love 
and law, " Glory be to thee, O Lord Most High!" and, from the 
farthest reach of thought and feeling, all the company of heaven 
fill the temple of God with the multitudinous and musical thunder 
of the united and overwhelming, "Amen, and Amen!" 

And the King, eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, 



238 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

our Saviour, wraps those interlocked cherubim in his loving arms 
and thrills the heavens with his royal edict, " What God hath joined 
together let not man put asunder." 

Those cherubim sublime are science and religion. As they had 
no struggle with each other when God gave them birth, as they had 
no conflict guarding the ark of law and love, as they shall have 
no discord when leading the choirs of eternity, so they have no 
conflict now. At the opening of this great University heaven and 
earth unite in saying, " If any man in these halls shall ever teach 
that there is real conflict between real science and real religion, let 
that man be anathema maranatha" 

[Pausing a moment at the close of his address Dr. Deems turned 
to Governor Porter, and said :] 

Your Excellency: Our friend, whose name this institution bears, 
has communicated with you by letter, expressing his appreciation 
of your excellency's courtesy in giving the emphasis of your official 
solicitation to the consideration extended him by the municipal 
authorities of Nashville, in the expression of their desire to make 
him the city's guest during these festive days of the inauguration 
of the University. 

He did me the honor to request me to bring to your excellency 
his respectful salutations, and to assure you that good and sufficient 
reasons exist for his absence, which is due to no lack of interest in 
this great Commonwealth of Tennessee, nor in this good city of 
Nashville, nor in this young University, for which he has done what 
he has done trusting that it will promote the general interests of 
learning and of this whole nation, without regard to sect or sec- 
tion. [Applause.] 

I have taken this occasion to make to you, publicly, a communi- 
cation which might have been rendered in private had fitting op- 
portunity occurred. 

Since I came to my place in this chapel, sir, a telegram has been 
handed me which I shall take the liberty of reading to the whole 
audience. 

[The speaker then took from the desk an envelope, which he 
opened, and read the following telegram :] 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 239 

New York, Oct. 4. — To Dr. Charles F. Deems: Peace and good- will to all 
men. C. Vanderbilt. 

This evoked hearty and prolonged applause from the audience. 

[Gazing a few moments on the portrait of Commodore Vanderbilt, 
which hung on the wall to his left, Dr. Deems, with great tender- 
ness of feeling, quoted the passage of Holy Scripture (Acts x. 31) :] 

Cornelius, thy prayer is heard, and thine alms are had in remembrance in the 
sight of God. 

[The eyes of the audience having been turned to the Commodore's 
portrait this remark of Dr. Deems kindled a degree of enthusiasm 
that found vent in an emphatic outburst of approval. The scene 
was one of a highly impressive and even dramatic force.] 



LETTERS TO THE " POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY." 

[At the time of the delivery of the Vanderbilt University address the Popular 
Science Monthly, published in New York city, was edited in the interests of 
opposition to the Christian religion. Its comments on my speech led to the 
following letters.] 

I.—" THE CONFLICT OF THE AGES." 

To the Editor of the Popular Science Monthly : 

Dear Sir : I have read this morning, with great pleasure, the arti- 
cle by President White, in the February number of your magazine, 
and am free to express gratification at seeing the extracts from my 
Vanderbilt University address placed in such " goodlie companie." 

But you must permit me to express my surprise at the tone and 
some of the statements which you make with regard to the two 
articles, and to the important subject which they discuss. You say 
that you print my argument because it is " on the other side of the 
question," and you would " not be accused of partiality or injustice 
to opposite views." This is utterly unaccountable to me. Presi- 
dent White and myself are in perfect accord in our articles so far as 
" the conflict " is concerned, so much so that, if we had had a confer- 
ence previous to the preparation of our two addresses we could 
scarcely have selected modes of treatment different from those we 
adopted. We should possibly have changed the order of the print- 



240 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

ing, and let his follow mine. Mine is a statement of doctrine, and 
his the proof. He has written almost nothing in his article which I 
might not have written if I had had his ability. He brings a 
masterly analysis and great wealth of learning to prove what I have 
asserted, and nothing in his article seems to stand against any thing 
in mine. We hold the same thesis, and sometimes express our 
ideas ipsissimis verbis. We both agree, if I have not utterly misap- 
prehended President White, that religious men make mistakes, and 
scientific men make mistakes, but there is no conflict between true 
religion and true science, the warfare of science being with some- 
thing other than religion. The first words of mine which you quote 
are these : " The recent cry of the ' Conflict of Religion and Science ' 
is fallacious, and mischievous to the interests of both science and 
religion" (p. 434). President White, in the first sentence of his 
thesis says: " In all modern history, interference with science in the 
supposed interest of religion . . . has resulted in direct evils 
both to religion and to science, and invariably" (p. 385). There we 
agree, and each undertakes to show the same thing in his own way. 
President White, in the second sentence of his thesis, says : " All 
untrammeled scientific investigation, no matter how dangerous to 
religion some of its stages may have seemed, for the time, to be, has 
invariably resulted in the highest good of religion and of science." 
In divers places in my article the same is set forth and maintained. 
On page 444 I say, " If, for instance, a conflict should come 
between geology and theology, and geology should be beaten, it 
will be so much the better for religion ; and, if geology should beat 
theology, still so much the better for religion," etc. In the next 
sentence, " geologists, psychologists, and theologists, must all ULTI- 
MATELY promote the cause of religion, because they must confirm 
one another's truths and explode one another's errors," etc. And, 
next sentence, u He (the religious man) knows and feels that it 
would be as irreligious in him to reject any truth found in Nature 
as it would be for another to reject any truth found in the Bible." 

Now, on this showing, my dear sir, I think that in a review of the 
two articles you should be ready to admit that Dr. White and I are 
not on " opposite " sides. We are advocates for the same client, 
speaking from different briefs but promoting the same cause. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



241 



But I am sorry to find that, while I thoroughly agree with Dr. 
White, you do not. You consider the conflict to be " natural," " in- 
evitable," " wholesome." Dr. White teaches that " the idea that 
there is a necessary antagonism between science and religion " 
is " the most unfortunate of all ideas " (p. 403). You oppose Dr. 
White more than you do me, for my moderate statement is that it 
is " fallacious " and " mischievous." 

I would fain " labor " with you, as some of our religious 
brethren say. It grieves me that you hold that an antagonism be- 
tween loving obedience to God — Religion, and intelligent study of 
God's works — Science, is " natural," " inevitable," " wholesome." 
If that be true it would seem to follow that the more religious a 
man is the less scientific he can be, or, what is worse, that the more 
scientific a man the less religious can he be ! Really you cannot 
mean what your statements logically convey. You cannot mean to 
teach that, the more wicked a man is, the better he is prepared for 
scientific investigation. But do not your words mean that ? 

To prove that there is a necessary conflict you call attention to 
" the attitude of mind of the great mass of devout and sincerely 
religious people toward the more advanced conclusions and scientific 
men of the present day." Who can tell what attitude that is? 
Each man knows his circle of acquaintances ; and here is my testi- 
mony : All " the devout and sincerely religious people " with whom 
I am acquainted accept all the " conclusions " of science so far as 
they know them. Some of them go further, and accept even the 
hypotheses and guesses of the most poetic and superstitious of 
" the scientific men of the day." The body of devout religious 
people, however, it is fair to add, do not accept all the guesses. 
All that can be reasonably asked of the religious people is that they 
shall accept as scientific " conclusions " only those teachings of 
science in regard to which there is no controversy among scientific 
men. A case cannot be called " concluded " while the argument is 
going on in court. The rotundity of the earth, the heliocentric 
theory, Kepler's three laws, are " concluded." No scientific man 
of repute expresses the slightest doubt of those, and the attitude 
of religious people toward them is one of thorough acceptance and 

genuine faith. There are some religious people who are evolution- 
16 



242 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

ists. Some are not. But the scientific men, " as such " arc just as 
much divided, so that that question cannot be called concluded. 

As to the attitude of religious people toward advanced scientific 
men it would be difficult to determine, because it would be difficult 
to determine who are the " advanced " scientific men. Whenever 
they settle that among themselves your question will really have 
great importance ; but if a clique should cry up one man as a burning 
and shining light in science, while the French Academy should be 
reported to have rejected him, when nominated for membership, on 
the ground that he is not scientific* need religious people have any 
attitude toward him at all ? But that there is no hostile attitude 
toward scientific men is shown by the fact that any scientific lecturer 
of ability may come from Europe to America, and the devout and 
religious people of the country will go in throngs to hear him, and 
pay liberally for the privilege. 

You close your article by expressing the opinion that a " desira- 
ble consummation " to " reach " would be " the entire indifference 
of religious people, as such, to the results of scientific inquiry." 
This is amazing. How can they be ? Religious people who are not 
scientific know very well, having had their attention freshly called 
thereto by Dr. White, the great benefits conferred on religion by 
the progress of science, which, as he admirably says, has " given to 
religion great new foundations, great new ennobling conceptions, a 
great new revelation of the might of God." Religious people owe 
too much to science, while science owes almost every thing to relig- 
ious people, to allow them to become entirely indifferent and give 
up science wholly to irreligious men. 

One thing let us agree on before we part. Nothing is advanced 
and no one is profited if religious men write and speak as though 
no man could be scientific and at the same time religious ; nor is 
any thing profited if men professing to be scientific talk of religious 
people patronizingly, as if they were simpletons. Can you not say 
" Amen " to that ? — and shake hands with 

Very respectfully and truly yours. 

New- York, January 27, 1876. 

* This was asserted at the time in regard to Mr. Darwin. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE, 243 

II.— "WHAT CONSTITUTES RELIGION?" 
To the Editor of The Popular Science Monthly : 

Dear Sir: The use of my name twice in your notice of Mr. 
Fiske's new work on The Unseen World, in your May number, per- 
haps justifies me in soliciting a small space for comment on some 
expressions in that notice. 

You are defending Dr. Draper from Mr. Fiske's trenchant attacks. 
To that there can be no objection. Confederates are justified in 
standing by one another ; but I do not think that you are justified 
in saying that " the point of contention is as to what constitutes 
religion." So far from there being contention on that point there 
is really no important difference. All " sects/' no matter how 
much they " eat each other up in their denial of dogmas," as you 
affirm, agree as to what religion is. It does not seem edifying to 
behold in you the temper which dictates the first of the following 
sentences, although the exceeding generosity of the careful proposal 
in the second has a redeeming -flavor. " We hope that the agree- 
ment of Messrs. Brownson, Hill, Washburn, Deems, Fiske & Co., in 
denouncing the groundlessness of the 'conflict,' will not be con- 
strued as implying any agreement among the parties as to what 
religion is. If these gentlemen will get together and settle the point 
an important step will be gained, and l^he Popular Science Monthly 
will gladly pay the expenses of a convention of reasonable length 
for such a purpose ; but we stipulate not to foot the bills until they 
reach an agreement." 

For the other gentlemen I cannot answer, but I simply say that 
I never did " denounce the groundlessness of the conflict," but have 
announced it and endeavored to demonstrate it, and you are wit- 
ness that I am " vehement in asserting the groundlessness and ab- 
surdity of Dr. Draper's assumption" of the conflict (page 113). 

Why are you so anxious to keep your readers from believing that 
the gentlemen whose names you have recited in fact do not, and 
really cannot, disagree as to what is " religion ?" Have you ever seen 
any thing in our writings or heard any thing in our oral teachings to 
justify the supposition that we do not agree ? As you challenge 
us, I accept the challenge for my part. I will not expose you to the 



244 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



cost of a convention, but here, in my study, without consultation 
with any of the other gentlemen you name, I venture to give two 
definitions of religion, in both of which I venture to predict that all 
those gentlemen, if they see this letter, will heartily agree, and that 
these definitions will win the assent also of Archbishop McCloskey, 
Bishop Potter, Bishop Foster, Bishop Wightman, Chancellor 
Crosby, Rev. Dr. Armitage, and Rev. Dr. Storrs, representatives of 
the leading " sects." 

To give the least first, here is my own definition : Religion is 
loving obedience to God's will. No matter how or where that will is 
discovered, nor what it is, he is a religious man who does what he 
believes will please God, because he loves God. 

The second is authoritative. It is that of St. James (i, 27): 
" True religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this : 
To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep 
himself unspotted from the world." A life of inward purity and 
outward beneficence is a religious life. 

I venture to think you may pass these around the whole circle of 
religionists and find unanimity. But do not we religionists disa- 
gree ? Certainly. The five gentlemen you have mentioned, and 
the seven whom I have named, differ more or less, oftener more 
than less, and on some points apparently irreconcilably. But mark : 
we never differ in our religion ; it is in our science. The moment 
two men become scientific, whether they are religious or not, they 
begin to " eat each other up in their denial of dogmas." So long 
as we keep to religion we are one. Our hearts are together. It is 
only with our heads that we butt one another. I have worshiped 
God in company with each of the seven distinguished clergymen 
whom I have ventured to name, and yet there is not one of them 
who does not hold some dogma of doctrine or ecclesiasticism to 
which I cannot subscribe. As religionists we agree. As scientists 
we differ. It is on the ground of our theology that we differ, and 
that is purely a scientific ground. Be pleased always to remember 
that theology is only a science like geology, or biology. 

But, my dear sir, we theologians would be out of fashion if we did 
not " eat each other up in our denial of dogmas." All other scien- 
tists do. The dogma of heterogenesis tries to " eat up " the dogma 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 245 

of homogenesis, while the dogma of pangenesis is fairly bursting 
itself to swallow both the others bodily ; and there is no small con- 
flict between spontaneity and heredity, and meanwhile biosis is 
striving vigorously to hold its ground against archebiosis. 

Behold! are not Religion and Life the two greatest subjects? 
You are quite anxious that your readers shall fancy that religionists 
cannot agree in their definitions of religion. But you do not show 
them that even on the subject of Life the scientists are greatly at 
difference. Professor Owen says that " Life is a sound ;" Schelling 
says it is a " tendency." Herbert Spencer calls it " a continuous ad- 
justment." Dr. Meissner says it is " but motion." Dr. Bastian 
holds that he has produced plants and animals from inorganic 
matter. Schultz positively believes it never was done and cannot be 
done ; and Professor Huxley holds that " constructive chemistry 
could do nothing without the influence of pre-existing living pro- 
toplasm." 

I do not wish to crowd your pages, and so content myself with 
these few instances out of the multitudes of conflicting and per- 
plexing differences among " advanced thinkers." 

Even you, my dear sir, have not utterly escaped. You once 
wrote : " If the forces are correlated in organic growth and nutri- 
tion, they must be in organic action." Manifestly, after that sentence 
was written, you meditated, and, meditating, you discovered that 
the sequitur was not quite as apparent as it ought to be. You did 
not strike out the sentence, but you apologized for it handsomely 
by saying, " From the great complexity of the conditions the same 
exactness will not be expected here as in the inorganic field." But 
you see, my dear sir, that theology is a science which has for its 
field those subjects in which there is the greatest complexity of con- 
ditions, and you must not demand of your brother scientists as 
much exactness in the statements of a metaphysical proposition as 
you may in the statement of the length of a fish's tooth. 

But as to your statement that the forces must be correlated in 
organic action, are you not in danger of being " eaten up " by the 
statements of your friends, Bastian, Barker, and, what is still 
harder on you, Herbert Spencer ? Professor Barker teaches that the 
correlation of the natural forces with thought " has never yet been 



246 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

measured." Then it is a mere " guess." Dr. Bastian says that it 
" cannot be proved " that sensation and thought are truly the direct 
results of molecular activity. Then it is a mere " guess." Mr. 
Herbert Spencer, whose name is conclusive authority with you, and 
who, I am most frank to admit, knows as much about the " unknow- 
able " as any writer whose works I have read, says that the outer 
force and the inward feeling it excites " do not even maintain an 
unvarying proportion." Then it is a mere " guess." And, my dear 
sir, I do most heartily agree with your statement, " not he who 
guesses is to be esteemed the true discoverer, but he who demon- 
strates a new truth." 

Now, if Messrs. Spencer, Barker, Tyndall, Huxley, Biichner, 
Draper, Youmans, " & Co.," will " get together and settle " what 
life is, or thought, " an important step will be gained ; " and, not 
to be outdone by your generosity, I will engage to " pay the ex- 
penses of a convention of reasonable length for such a purpose," 
but I " stipulate not to foot the bills until you reach an agree- 
ment." 

Trusting that both you and I, as we grow older, may have more 
science and more religion, and room enough in our heads and 
hearts for both without "conflict," I am, very faithfully, your 
co-laborer. 
May, 1876. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 247 



CHUNKS FOR THE THOUGHTFUL. 



A PLEA FOR WORKING-WOMEN. 

[Preached in behalf of the '* Working-Women's Protective Union," on the evening of April 12, 1868.] 

Called upon to preach in behalf of the Working-Women's Pro- 
tective Union, I feel at once a pride and a shame of my work. It is 
good to be proud of the confidence implied by the invitation to 
speak a word for any fellow-being supposed to be under the ban or 
under the burden ; but it is a shame that in the nineteenth of the 
Christian centuries there exists in society the necessity of a union to 
protect working-women. You have no " protective " associations to 
care for working-men, or for men who do not work ; and society is 
such that they do not need it. But here you have presented to you 
a body of persons banded together to " protect " women; and not 
idling, frivolous, empty, worthless women, but women who work ! 
The suggestion of the necessity of such a society is amazing. You 
must indulge me a little that I may turn the idea about in my mind 
and become a little used to such a monstrosity. 

That woman, who gave birth to men and women ; woman, who 
is mother, playmate, teacher, sister, sweetheart, wife, to the world ; 
woman, that has something in her tender eyes, her sensitive lips, her 
very motions, that appeals to every thing just and generous in human 
nature ; that she, who, if she did not protect the world, could totally 
depopulate the earth in thirty-five years ; that she, not in sickness, 
not in idleness, not in crime, but when she is working, should need 
" protection," is monstrous. 

From whom ? It ought not to be from fellow-workers, of the male 
sex or of her own. Every assistant lightens the load, and it does 
not matter whether the hand be masculine or feminine so that the 
work is done. It ought not to be from any non-worker of either 
sex, as they owe their immunity to the industry of these laborers, 
and the more that labor the sooner will the world's work be done, 
and the more general rest there will be and the less blame to those 
who toil not. 



248 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

And yet working-women do need protection ; and that is all they 
claim : " Protect us merely, keep off imposition and injustice, and 
we will do the rest." It is unreasonable and unrighteous that they 
should need protection ; but, if their plea be as I have just stated 
it, it is both reasonable and righteous. It is easy to understand how, 
in the fourteenth century before Christ, the working-woman whose 
case is in the text and context, should need protection ; and our 
hearts warm toward the respectable and reasonable gentleman who 
constituted himself a " protective " in behalf of Ruth ; but after 
Jesus and Mary, that human society should go radically wrong 
through nearly two chiliads of years, upon a question so absorbingly 
and universally interesting and important, is amazing. 

It is part of the legitimate work of the gospel ministry to apply 
the ethics of Jesus to the solution of the problems of society, and 
to show an earnest and tender interest in behalf of all that are in 
any way wronged. In the discharge of that duty to-night I must 
solicit a large liberty, and, if some things I say may not be in accord 
with the theories of the patrons of the association, they will believe 
that my heart is in concord with theirs, and my desire is as earnest 
as theirs to bring society to correct views and right action in this 
department. 

In the beginning we may as well disabuse our minds of any 
errors into which we have fallen or been led in regard to the dig- 
nity of labor/ There is no dignity in labor in the sense of taxing 
toil. It is a degradation, a curse, the fruit of sin. It is an abnormal 
condition for a human being, made in the intellectual and moral like- 
ness of God. Holy Scripture plainly teaches that. And all the 
instincts of men teach that. Every effort of every toiler is to put 
himself in such a condition as to render toil unnecessary. Men 
work hard that they may the sooner cease to work hard. The very 
men who write books and deliver lectures on the " dignity of labor," 
striving to glorify inglorious moiling in the dirt and the deep deg- 
radation of unloved and uneasy work, go through the drudgery of 
labor that they may obtain that which will procure some beautiful 
paradise on the Hudson or elsewhere, where they need no longer whip 
up their bodies and minds, like dray-horses, to pull the loads of life. 

The burden-bearers bow themselves and sing the songs of toil 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 249 

that they may forget their troubles ; and to preserve their self- 
respect they cherish all the words you speak to them about " the 
dignity of labor." But the very phrase has a sardonic grin and a 
tone of bitter sarcasm. Dignity, indeed ! There are operations of 
the intellect and exertions of the body which may be in accord with 
dignity, but they are such only as give pleasure while performed, 
and leave no pain, no head-ache, no heart-ache, no limb-ache behind, 
and are such as one returns to with as much alacrity as one leaves. 
The work of God is such. He never wearies himself. When we 
speak of God " resting from his work " we can only mean that his 
work ceased. 

So when Adam and Eve were in paradise, and went to bed when 
they wished, and rose when they chose, and tended and trimmed the 
vines and bushes of their garden, making no fatiguing exertion, 
never weary, taking just such exercise as made repose sweet ; trim- 
ming no midnight lamp ; void of anxiety as to the morrow's break- 
fast ; untroubled as to the condition of some distant part of their 
plantation ; without knowledge of alarm-clocks, factory-bells, bank 
hours, business engagements, work to be done, work to be undone, 
work to be taken home, and all the other discomforts of modern 
toil and modern civilization, the anxieties that make premature 
wrinkles, and the wrenching work which pumps copious sweat from 
men and women — then there was dignity in work, for it was the 
unwearying work of a gentleman and the unfatiguing work of a lady, 
"the grand old gardener and his wife." But Patrick digging in the 
sewer and Biddy scrubbing in the suds do not strike us as being 
eminently suggestive of dignity. 

Come look at this person in a cheerless and chairless garret, sitting 
on an empty soap-box, in a thin, torn calico frock — 

" in unwomanly rags, 
With fingers weary and worn, 

With eyelids heavy and red, 

Plying her needle and thread 
In poverty, hunger and dirt." 

Go stand under her shattered roof and on her naked floor, in the 
dull December light or when the weather is warm and bright, and 
speak to her who has 



250 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

" No blessed leisure for love or hope, 

But only time for grief — 
A little weeping would ease her breast ; 

But in their briny bed 
Her tears must stop, for every drop 

Hinders needle and thread." 

Tell her of the dignity of labor, the nobility of toil. You will seem, as 
you will be, a heartless mocker of the unfortunate. Go to the poor 
lace-maker who works in a cellar, because the threads which her cun- 
ning fingers make into marvelous beauty are so exceedingly fine 
that they must be wrought in a damp place, and while she aches with 
her rheumatisms and feels that she is bringing on blindness, that 
night in which no woman can work, tell her of the " dignity " of 
labor! Go to the poor writer, racking her brain for plot and incident, 
for sentiment and rhyme, for what will make a " sensation," will sell 
to the editor or publisher ; an unloved work, not the spontaneous 
outgush of hearty poetry, but bitter waters laboriously pumped up 
from the almost dry wells of her brain and her heart, for a pittance 
which merely brings enough to keep soul and body together — meet 
her on the way from office to office in rusty garments and darned 
gaiters, and tell her of the " dignity " of labor ! 

They will tell you that they seem naturally to prefer the dignity 
of the lady who wears the laces of the one and reads the books of 
the other. They will tell you that it seems so strange to them that 
if there be dignity in labor there never has been found yet a solitary 
man or woman, since the day Adam and Eve went fleeing from the 
swords of cherubim down to this blessed date, who has sought the 
dignity of labor. Millions have struggled for the dignity of place, 
of power, of learning, of wealth, of honor, of social position, of 
thrones, scepters, and crowns, but never a human being for the dig- 
nity of labor. Every body wants the dignity, but nobody wants the 
labor. It is a notion, a sham, a pretense, a lie ! There is no dig- 
nity in an undesired, an unloved or forced, a painful, a wearing toil. 
He or she that endures it may be white or black, may have suffrage 
or be without ballot, but he or she is a slave, and doing the work of 
a slave, whether the master be known or unknown. 

But there may be a very great worthiness and a very noble dig- 
nity in the man or woman who is toiling in poverty, weakness, 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 25 1 

wretchedness, in mine, or smithy, or shop, or cheerless cellar or attic. 
There is a dependence upon others worse than the worst labor. 
There may be an alternative more degrading than the most degrad- 
ing toil. There is no labor so undignified as a cowardly shirking of 
one's responsibilities. There is no employment so mean as not to 
be chosen before an inane giving up to die of mere inefficiency. 
The strong swimmer in his agony has more dignity than the floating 
corpse. Immunity from painful exertion of limb or brain may be 
purchased at the price of the surrender of virtue and honor, of peace 
of conscience and of self-respect. The price is too great for the 
purchase. 

Frequently it happens, in the chances and changes of this mortal 
life, that a man comes into such position that the very existence of 
those to whom he is bound by every human tie depends upon his 
giving his whole life to a drudgery, incomplete, unwholesome, irk- 
some, and contrary to all his natural instincts and cultivated tastes. 
To prefer all lowness of position and all loads of labor before the 
suffering of those we love, that is really dignity ; but the dignity is 
in the man, not in this dirty work. 

It is the break of day. Painfully do the first rays of the winter 
sun break through the soiled and cobwebbed window-panes of a 
garret on the outskirts of the city. A poor, thin girl rises from her 
poor bed, on which all the clothes of herself and her little brother 
have been piled to keep them endurably warm through the cold 
night. It was midnight when she retired ; he had been in bed sev- 
eral hours ; she had worked on by the dim light flung from a gut- 
tering candle, wasting away at the top of a bottle. Through those 
solitary hours her heart had gone back to her childhood ; to the birth 
of that little brother when she was ten years old, to her father's 
struggle against the stream, to his death, to her mother's widow- 
hood and speedy decline and departure, to the hour when she stood 
in all the world with no relative but that little brother ; to the resolve 
she made to be father and mother and sister to that boy until he 
would be able to take his place among men. Her needle sewed all 
those memories with her seams, and when the midnight hour struck 
she dropped her work from chilled fingers and lay down beside her 
little brother, her head burning, her feet so cold she dared not touch 



25: 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



him lest he cry. And now when the morning came, after her uneasy 
sleep, she rises stiffly on her aching limbs and counts a few coals out 
of that a bushel of which has cost her the making of a coat. And 
by this little fire she must work through all the day and take no time 
to rest. A coat must be made for the fire ; two shirts must be made 
for the rent ; and then, if she has strength to make any thing more, 
that may go for food ; and if the three meals of her brother and her- 
self cost fifty cents she must make six flannel shirts, or nine heavy 
overalls for men. At night she must cross the ferry and thread the 
streets and carry her work home and bring back another bundle, 
draggling through snow and slush in poor, thin raiment. 

Is there any dignity in that labor? None whatever. Is there 
any dignity in that young woman's character? Much every way. 
She prefers toil to crime. She has a dignity unknown to the bediz- 
ened courtezan who spreads her painted charms to every lounger on 
the steps of St. Nicholas and Fifth Avenue hotels brazingly gazing 
at every passing woman. 

And, my fair and virtuous sisters, dear ladies of my congregation, 
ye roses of the fashionable avenues, ye lilies of the broad streets, so 
like the flowers in that ye toil not, neither do ye spin, and yet in 
your array surpassing even Solomon when he was playing dandy- 
husband to a thousand wives, let me tell even you that that working- 
girl, in all her toil and drudgery, has more dignity in the eyes of true 
men and of God than you with all the fine point of your manners 
and all the Vere de Vere repose of your caste. She prefers to bend 
her body rather than her soul, and to crush her flesh rather than 
sacrifice her spirit. 

Perhaps, also, we may do well to disabuse our minds of some 
errors as to women as well as some errors as to work. I know how 
gingerly one is expected to walk where there are so many traps of 
prejudice set about in the social garden. What is woman s sphere ? 
That is the question fundamental to the whole discussion, as all 
must admit. And that is precisely the question which no one is pre- 
pared to answer. In general the sphere of any creature is supposed 
to be its circuit of motion, action, employment or influence. Surely 
to do nothing is no sphere at all. Of any human creature, perhaps, 
we should all agree to say that his sphere is the position in which he 



FOR E VER Y FIRESIDE. 253 

can most readily do that thing which his nature and his acquirements 
enable him to do best. In this view what is woman s sphere? I 
confess I do not know, for the reason that I do not know of woman 
what it is she can do best. There are, perhaps, a few things which 
most women have done better than most men ; some things that 
men, perhaps, have done better than most women. At least, there 
is a popular opinion to that effect. But whether there is any thing 
that woman can do better than man, or man than woman, is an 
open question. And it is open because neither sex has had a fair 
chance. Law or custom or prejudice has embarrassed each in an 
attempt to find what could be done most pleasurably and most suc- 
cessfully. It has brought a sneer upon Hercules to take the distaff 
from Omphale, and upon Omphale to take the club from Hercules. 
Why no one can tell. But a sneer hurts, whether it have a reason 
in it or not, and the history of the world shows that men and women 
are led less by their own noses than by the noses of other people. 

There are many things to be done for individual, domestic and 
social comfort, refinement and advancement. Food is to be obtained 
and cooked, shelters are to be devised and erected, clothing is to be 
fashioned and made, houses and clothes are to be repaired and kept 
clean, laws are to be framed, interpreted, and executed, articles are 
to be transported from place to place, and the young are to be 
instructed in the ethical and physical principles involved in these 
several occupations. Probably that simple summary will include all 
the pursuits of men : agriculture, architecture, trade, commerce, 
navigation, government, art, science, mechanism, literature, house- 
keeping, and the making of all the implements, and the shaping of 
all the materials necessary for the successful prosecution of all these 
pursuits. 

Now, suppose you show that among these that are ordinarily con- 
fined to women, or rather to which women have been ordinarily 
confined, there are some which many men can do as well or better. 
Why not let the me,n do those things without feeling that they lose 
in public estimation ? There are men who can make fires, wash 
clothes, darn stockings, construct garments, keep house, set tables, 
aye, and even nurse babes in a style which it was never given to any 
woman to surpass, and to very few to equal. Why should not that 



254 



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be that man's sphere ? On the other hand, if a woman can write a 
book, or manage a bank, or conduct a business, or preside over a 
railroad company, or do any other legitimate thing better than any 
man who happens at the time to be free for this work, why should 
she not do it? Can any man give against her a reason which rises 
above the altitude of a prejudice? 

It does seem to be most reasonable that each human being should 
be allowed to do that which he or she can do with most ease, most 
pleasure, and most profit. This division of the whole heaven of 
humanity into two spheres — a sphere for man and a sphere for 
woman — seems eminently absurd. Each soul must find a sphere 
for itself, on the general principle just laid down. If the man in 
the study is a better cook than the woman in the kitchen, and she 
a better thinker and writer than he, do let him go down among the 
pots, and let her go up among the pens, and let us have done with 
sickly, atrabilious theology or politics, and with badly-cooked food, 
and let us have better books and better dinners, two people cured 
of dyspepsia, and affairs generally more harmonious and pleasing 
to the heavenly Father. 

The world wants good food and plenty of it, good and sufficient 
clothing and houses, convenient modes of transit and transport, 
and it wants books, pictures, statues, and it wants every thing and 
any thing that ministers to physical and intellectual pleasure. 
Why should the world make a fool of itself by its senseless fastid- 
iousness, and prefer to have some things worse done because done 
by women, and other things worse done because done by men ? I 
want the very best house, and do not care whether it was man or 
woman that drew the design, or man or woman that laid the courses 
of stone in its erection. 

Let us be reasonable, and the whole necessity for the existence of 
a " Working-Woman's Protective Union " will utterly disappear 
from society. That necessity has been created by prejudices. It 
seems impracticable for the men that are in the world to do all that 
is necessary to be done to support themselves, and also support all 
the women and all the children ; or else, among men there are so 
many idlers and non-producers that some women must be pushed 
into the working-ranks to keep the world above the mark of starva- 



FOR E VER Y FIRESIDE. 2 5 5 

tion. As these women step forward they need protection until 
they can have gained so firm a footing that they can protect them- 
selves. 

1. They need protection against the prejudices which exclude 
women from many an employment to which they are adapted by their 
physical and mental characteristics. Any employment which unfits 
a woman for the proper discharge of her duties as wife, mother, sister, 
or daughter, is an improper employment for the woman ; all other 
employments are legitimate. That seems to be the verdict of reason. 
And yet women are frowned upon, pushed back, and discouraged 
when seeking to do those rightful things, and when the choice is 
simply between doing those things and starvation or crime. There 
are those in this community who have no interest in woman's find- 
ing proper work, as in that case it diminishes the number of those 
who minister to the criminal indulgences of society. But honest 
people do have such an interest. If having stated paid work to do 
does not incapacitate a man for all the demands upon him as a lover, 
husband, father, or friend, why should similar pursuits be supposed 
to be injurious to a woman ? 

2. The Protective Union can do the work of finding employment 
for women who are not able to look up this work for themselves. It 
is a very easy thing to tell women to go and find more feminine or 
more remunerative work ; but how are they to do it ? There is a 
mother with her child. If that mother works sixteen hours a day 
she can barely obtain enough to pay for the rent of her wretched 
room, and enough coal to keep her and her child from freezing, and 
enough food to keep their souls in their bodies. She must not stop 
a day, not an hour, or she is turned upon the streets, or lies down 
to starve beside her child. She has not an inch of margin. She 
works up side by side with the grim specter of starvation. If she 
hold tightly to it she keeps starvation off the domain of life ; but 
let her stop a day and wear down her strength by tramping the 
streets in search of better work, and starvation wins the ground. 
She weakens, she faints, she dies. Who is her friend to ward off 
such an emergency? This Protective Union. It finds sympathy, 
help, place, and work for her. 

3. It seeks to protect her in her health. That is a working- 



256 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

woman s capital. That gone she is bankrupt. And many a woman 
comes from the country rich in exuberant health who is poisoned 
by foul air and wretched food. Some of these women work at home, 
some in places provided by their employers. In the latter instance, 
if you will take the pains to-morrow to make a tour of Broadway, 
going ten squares up or down from where I speak to-night, and will 
visit the shops of great manufacturers and fashionable dress-makers 
on that great thoroughfare and the streets which cross it, you will 
find some places where as many as thirty women are working in a 
room twelve feet by twenty, and up to a late bed-time by gas each 
burner of which has the same effect upon the atmosphere as the 
work of ten pairs of human lungs ; and in that foulness how I have 
seen women fading and perishing ! Some of these work-rooms are 
bed-rooms, and into the foulness of a pent-up apartment soon after 
daylight in a winter morning the poor working-woman must come. 
I hope to see the day when public sentiment shall make this Pro- 
tective Union so strong that its sanitary committee can control all 
this, and make it more than an employer dare do to imitate the 
horrors of " the middle passage" right here in the heart of the 
commercial metropolis of Christendom. 

4. The Association presented to you to-night is protective to 
working-women against impositions and frauds. Unless you have 
looked into this matter you have little idea of the extent to which 
women suffer from the brutality and dishonesty of men. Let me 
tell you some of the prices paid in this city by the most reputable 
houses for woman's work. For making a blue cotton shirt she is 
paid six cents, and she finds her own thread ! For a dozen heavy 
"overalls" for men, sixty-two cents ; for a linen coat, fifteen cents ; 
for flannel shirts, a dollar a dozen. There is a widow with four chil- 
dren to support who embroiders infants' cloaks for a large estab- 
lishment in Broadway. Each of these garments requires two weeks 
of incessant toil to complete it, and is sold in the store at which it 
is made for from $50 to $75, while the poor woman whose skillful 
hands fashioned the dainty garment receives $4 50 for the labor of 
a fortnight. And through those two weeks her children, in their 
thin clothes, sit shivering by and gazing at the magnificent cloak 
that is to keep your child warm. And for this work the mother 



FOR E VER Y FIRESIDE. 257 

has thirty-two cents a day. She cannot find a room to hold the five 
which does not cost her at least fifteen cents a day, and her fuel and 
her light, and food for five persons, must be procured with the seven- 
teen cents that are left ! O think of it, think of it, ye favored women 
of my congregation ! Some of you in your luxurious homes have 
murmured to me of your lot, and before some of you who have 
been so distressed at losses of thousands while thousands still remain 
there are sitting other sisters who have been all this long winter 
working at these starvation prices. 

" You would not do it ! " What would you do ? Refuse the work ? 
The reply of your employer would be — heartless but truthful — that, 
" If you do not choose to do the work there are thousands who will 
jump at it." 

But the low pay is not the worst of it. If these working-women 
could only be sure that, after the work is done, they will be treated 
fairly and paid promptly, they might make some calculation. But 
hear what has happened. 

A girl went to an employer. She was compelled to have work, 

starve, or do worse. The bargain was made. It was at such figures 

as barely covered the absolute expense of mere existence in the 

lowest way known to the most impoverished portion of our society. 

At the end of the week she called for her pay. The work had been 

properly done. There was no complaint. But her employer paid 

her only a portion ; was a little straitened that week ; would pay all the 

next week. What could she do ? There was no way to compel 

payment before she left the house. The amount kept back would 

have just about paid her lodging. To quarrel with her employer 

would be to lose her place, and to lose also what he owed her. The 

resort was to pawn some article of her limited wardrobe and pay 

her lodgings. The second week this was repeated, and began to be 

exasperating. But how could she collect it? How force him to 

pay? She had no friends. Her Hibernian landlady was put off 

with some trouble, after uttering a few words most hard to bear. 

And so it went on until it was absolutely necessary to have the 

money or not return to her lodgings and to the few poor clothes 

which constituted her whole earthly store. Then desperation made 

her positive and peremptory ; whereupon her employer flew into a 
17 



258 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

passion and drove her from the house without her pay. In such a 
case what could she do ? 

Or what is that working-woman to do who found an employer 
willing to pay her higher wages than usual, but demanded a deposit 
in advance and then refused to pay her for her work, pretending 
that it was badly done, and drove her off without her pay and with- 
out her deposit? Or what was that girl to do who, being in the 
employment of a man, found a situation where her pay would be 
greater, and whose application for payment when she was about to 
leave so enraged her employer that he kicked her down stairs ? Or 
what were they to do — those poor victims of one of their own sex — 
the notorious Sophia Myers, who was sent to the penitentiary for 
six months for swindling sewing-girls? 

All these facts and figures and questions point to the work of the 
Protective Union. It has before it a great work; and young as it 
is, and little as public attention has been called to its operations, it 
has already achieved noble things. It is worth putting on record 
the statement that during the last year 3,379 were supplied with 
work, and although from the great competition of thousands of 
applicants the prices are miserably small, yet it saved them from 
starvation. They comprised women and girls of all nationalities, 
religions and conditions, regardless of origin or color. Of these 442 
were widows, 495 soldiers' widows, 134 soldiers' wives, 585 orphans, 
592 half-orphans, 651 girls with parents, 431 women with husbands; 
49 were homeless, friendless girls, thrown upon their own resources 
and the charities of the world. 

For such, in Christ's dear name, and in the name of the sweet 
charity of his religion, I make my plea. I plead with you by your 
sense of right, by your chivalry, by your highest manhood, by all 
the regards you bear the sex your mother bore, the sex to which 
the Christ of God was ever gentlest and most tender, by all your 
wishes to purify society, to bring social harmony, and to save souls 
from destruction. I plead with the beaux, the philosophers, the 
working-men, the Christians of this congregation. Gentlemen, if 
you should see a woman on a furious horse dashing toward a prec- 
ipice it would be the first impulse of your manhood to spring toward 
the steed and attempt to save its rider. Toward that precipice 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 259 

down which, when women go, not one in a hundred ever comes 
back, are thousands of women in this city driving to night. There 
are 40,000 women in this city to-night between whom and starva- 
tion or crime stands only the work they may be able to procure. 
A very small number make any thing above a respectable support, 
not many make even a respectable livelihood ; the large majority 
are barely able to procure the absolute necessaries of life. They 
have not a dime on Monday morning. Upon some of them depends 
a crippled father or bed-ridden mother, or little brother or sister. 
Some of them are from the country, lured by the promises of work 
by parties who plotted their ruin. Many of them are saintly pure, 
and some of them are grandly lofty in thought and purpose and 
spirit. But life, gentlemen, is very, very sweet, even to women. It 
must be very hard to go five days without food, tramping the streets 
for work all day and sleeping in a station-house at night. When 
faint and sinking the tempter comes. O have mercy upon these 
women ! Save them — just to live is all they ask, and for that and 
their chastity they are willing to pay a day's full work every day 
in every week. Will you crowd over the precipices the wretched 
women who are clinging for life ? 

And I plead with you, sisters of the workers, to have mercy upon 
them and give help. See that when you are wearing laces and em- 
broidered dresses, and all those elegancies which make you look so 
charming, there are no drops of tears and heart's blood visible to 
the angels and to God, tears and blood for which you may have been 
rendered responsible by your heartlessness. Help them that are 
helping your sex. Down with your prejudices ; up with your cour- 
age. Examine the questions of woman's labor. Help them that 
are helping women. Help them to seek new and appropriate fields 
of labor; to appeal to employers to allow better wages, furnish bet- 
ter work-rooms, and adapt the working-hours to the demands of 
health ; to secure protection from frauds and impositions ; to secure 
work for worthy workers, and to create in the community more sym- 
pathy for the defenseless condition of working-women. 

The text to-night has served mostly for a motto. But see how 
Boaz speaks to us down thirty centuries. The Ruth of our age rises 
up to glean — to glean, gentlemen ; not to plow or sow or reap. She 



2 6o CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

is not a beggar, but a worker. She does not ask all, or even a large 
part, but the gleanings. O, let us let her glean ! Let us command 
the "young men" not to "reproach" her, for there is nothing to 
reproach in what she does. She cannot endure to sit by the road- 
side as a harlot and carry the wages of sin home to her old mother 
that she may have food withal. Do not " rebuke " her. The field 
is wide. The harvest is great. Let us " let fall also some of the 
handfuls on purpose for her." Nay, gentlemen, if she come close 
up into our employments, into shop and store and counting-house 
and office and study, " let her glean even among the sheaves" for she's 
a good, sweet girl, our modern Ruth, and has an old mother at 
home. She is just as good as Boaz's Ruth. And that grand old 
gentleman, O ! how his kindness was repaid ! But I will not sway 
your Christian charity with thoughts like that. Let us show the 
world that the Christianity and civilization of the nineteenth post- 
Christum century is superior to the culture of the fourteenth ante- 
Christum century, by producing on every street and in every block 
a Boaz who stops and steps aside from his work to be a protector of 
the women whose circumstances have thrown them into the field 
which is to be reaped by us all, not for ourselves, but for the Lord 
of the harvest. 



A PLEA FOR SAILORS. 



[Delivered at the Fortieth Anniversary of the American Seamen's Friend Society, in the Fourth Avenue 
Presbyterian Church (Rev. Dr. Crosby's), Monday evening, May n, 1868.] 

After an eloquent speech by the Rev. H. M. Storrs, D.D., on 
being presented by the President, William A. Booth, Esq., Dr. 
Deems said : 

Mr. President : It may be as well to begin my remarks by con- 
fessing, before our Lord and this large and cultivated congregation 
of Christians, my own shortcomings of interest and labor in behalf 
of sailors. In common, it is feared, with many of my brethren in 
all branches of the Church, I have allowed the multitudes of men 
who go down to the sea in ships to sail away, so far as I have been 
concerned, from all notice, all sympathy, all prayer, all effort for 
their salvation. Lately my mind and heart have been strongly 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 26 1 

drawn toward seamen, and I was glad when my friend, your secre- 
tary, Rev. Dr. Hall, asked me to make a brief appeal in their behalf 
to-night. The effort may be feeble, but the motive and intent, be 
assured, are most sincere, hearty, and earnest. 

1. In the first place, the number of mariners is so large as to 
demand attention. It is estimated that there are half a million of 
American sailors, twice as many British, and of all nations fully three 
millions of men whose business is in ships and with the sea, actually 
engaged in the navies and the commercial transports of the world. 
Three millions of human beings ! three millions of immortal souls ! 
In the computations of the divine Teacher the loss of one of these 
souls would not be compensated by the gain of a whole world, and 
the loss of these millions could not be made good by the gain of all 
the solar system, with all its worlds and forces and resources. If 
these three millions of men were smitten instantly from existence 
by a sudden blow of annihilation, and at that same instant the 
omnific word of God should speak into existence another system of 
worlds as high and grand and glorious as this, the universe would 
not be as rich as it is now. Such is Christ's estimate of a soul's 
worth. 

Imagine a city of three millions adult population, all men, in the 
vigorous use of their powers. What a sight that would be ! What 
a field for Christian effort ! How philosophy would study the social 
problems it afforded, and how religion would yearn over that vast 
mass of humanity ! That all these are scattered over the world does 
not diminish, but rather vastly increases, their importance. For — 

2. Be pleased to consider, that while, to a sailor, his own soul is 
of no more worth than is the soul of any other man to himself, there 
may be something in the employments and position of sailors which 
renders them more important to the world than other men. And 
there is. The sailorhood of the world is the world's propaganda. 
Sailors are the circulating medium. They go every- where. They 
carry every thing, especially themselves, into all parts of the world ; 
from India to the poles; from the hut where the stunted, blubber- 
eating Esquimau shivers to the kraal where the naked cannibal 
sweats. If these men were all confined to a certain limit and the 
world excluded they could only influence one another. If they 



262 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

were settled in a certain city they would influence only themselves 
and those who came to them. But they move. They circulate. They 
wait not to be visited — they visit. It is unfortunate for an inhab- 
itant of an inland mountain village to be narrow and sordid and 
vicious. But, in such a case, the evil does not spread extensively or 
rapidly. But sailors spread all of wisdom or ignorance, of vice or 
virtue, which they possess. Fancy these three millions on .an island 
unvisited by men. A loathsome, contagious disease might invade 
them. It could spread only to the limit of that population, and its 
ravages would cease for want of material. They might all die. There 
the destruction would stop. But fancy every one of those three 
millions to be infected of the small-pox, and from that island to be 
transported to every known port of the world and turned loose among 
the inhabitants. What consternation, what horrors, what destruc- 
tion would they not propagate among all peoples ! The same holds 
good of their power and opportunities to propagate the virus of vice. 
Better have any other three millions of men upon earth weak, 
ignorant, and wicked, than your three millions of itinerant, restless, 
irrepressible sailors ! Men that are stationary can do the world little 
harm until they injure the morals of some man that goes from place 
to place and touches mankind at many points. 

3. Regard the debt of gratitude the world owes its sailors. But 
for them, to say nothing of peopling our continents and islands, 
how slow would be the progress of civilization ! Each nation would 
have to struggle on as best it could, gathering from its own soil 
what wealth it could, and shaping it as well as practicable, without 
the benefit of the example, the aid and the stimulus of other nations, 
and without the products of other lands and without the fabrics 
produced by other populations. 

To bring this home to ourselves let us fancy that before to-mor- 
row morning there should be suddenly taken out of this great city 
every book, picture, statue, engine, implement, wrought-work of any 
kind, fine and coarse goods, and every idea and every MAN that have 
been brought to us from every part of the world during the last 
quarter of a century ! No ! We are not equal to that fancy. We 
are not sufficiently conscious of our indebtedness to other lands to 
paint to ouselves the picture of the emptiness, the disruption, the 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 263 

desolation there would be. The goods would leave a thousand 
stores and warehouses bare ; splendid mansions would be dismantled ; 
manufactories would be silent because the machinery had departed ; 
4< the stone would cry out of the wall," FAREWELL ! "and the beam 
out of the timber would answer it ; " the walls of art galleries and 
the alcoves of libraries would be stripped of their most precious 
treasures, and the opera-houses would be hushed, for the singing 
men and singing women would have flown ; and there would be no 
display of belles and beaux on Broadway and the Avenue, for she 
that should put off her silks and laces and fine linens and jewelry 
after to-night's entertainment would awake in the morning poor 
" Flora McFlimsey, of Madison Square," and absolutely and literally 
with " nothing to wear ; " and her " nice " young friend, Frederick 
Augustus Shoddy, whose father grew so rich in the war by cheating 
the soldiers and swindling the Government that Frederick Augustus 
has nothing about him that is not foreign, would awake to find his 
wardrobe suddenly reduced to the summer costume of a Fiji 
islander ; and the poor drayman's occupation would be gone, and 
rents would fall, and the Atlantic cable be drowned, and business 
stagnate, and amid all this new and huge distress all the great and 
beautiful concepts, ideas, fancies, and thoughts which the artists of 
foreign lands have sent us would be absent. 

O I cannot go on ! I do not know what it is the sailors have not 
brought us. But in so much as we should be impoverished if we 
should lose all that hath come to us from afar in ships in the last 
quarter of a century in so much are we the debtors of the sailors 
of that period. And in the extremest mountain cove of our land it 
would probably be impossible to find a man who is not debtor to 
the uncared-for sailor. 

4. The sailor is indispensable. That you may feel how true that 
is, say that from this hour there shall be no more sailors. Disband 
the whole marine force of the world. Ships would rot in the docks, 
the products of the earth would rot on distant plantations, seaports 
would be emptied, for men would fly for food, all city property would 
become worthless, all city heat and intensity which stimulate the 
mental activity of the world would be gone. Paris must be as far 
from us, for all uses, as any city that may exist in the planet Uranus. 



264 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

We should know nothing of what the other peoples of the world 
were thinking and doing, and they would lose all the power and 
vitality with which this young nation is vivifying the race and the 
century. You should have no more foreign books, pictures, statues, 
preachers, lecturers, singers, machinery, materials, and ideas. You 
could send nothing abroad, not even your invalid daughter for her 
health and your gifted artist boy for his culture. Your coasting 
would all be done away, and even your home products would become 
more difficult of transportation. Science would have a vast domain 
of observation cut away. Your planet would be reduced to the 
continent you inhabit. The shrinkage would be sudden and pro- 
digious. 

You can do well enough without your soldier, the epauletted and 
strutting " fuss and feathers," the costliest piece of worthlessness 
modern civilization insanely maintains and idolizes. But you cannot 
do without your sailor. If there had been no cannon or sword, no 
general or private, no army or armor in any part of the globe during 
the past century, who does not believe that the world would have 
been happier? But would it have been happier if there had been 
no ship, no sailor, no white sails on the seas and no smoke-track 
across the ocean? And yet you parade your soldiers, and remem- 
ber them, and pay them well, and give them honors, and erect mon- 
uments to them when they are dead. Did they ever dare more 
than the sailor ? Is the picket outpost more dangerous than the 
yard-arm in a heavy sea? Did you feel the force of the stanza 
which you sung a few moments ago ? 

" How little know ye, who are peacefully sleeping 

On beds of repose, unawakened and warm, 
The woes of the sailor, his dreary watch keeping, 

Amid all the horrors of midnight and storm." 

Think of his strange and lonely and unappreciated life ! Think 
of the arctic colds that benumb him and the tropic suns that scorch 
him! Think of his battle with the fierce storms, when seas come 
down upon his ship with the impetuosity of a cavalry charge and a 
thunder like the crash of artillery ! And his battles are fought 
without the stimulus of drum and trumpet and wheeling squadrons, 
and the loud shout of men and the prancing of the snorting war- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 265 

steeds, and all the kindling electricity of a thousand eyes that flash 
the same fire as his and witness his deeds of daring. They are 
performed in the solitude of mid-ocean ; they are achieved unap- 
plauded in the heart of unsympathetic darkness. Through all the 
night he is straining every faculty and power that is in him to bring 
your child and my wife and thousands of treasure safe to port ; 
and in the night he may be swept from the deck or fall from the 
yard-arm amid the howl of a tempest that drowns his death-scream, 
and it was only a sailor lost ! No chronicles, no poets for him, no 
orators, no monument ! Why, there is probably not a month in 
which six hundred sailors do not dare all that the British Light 
Brigade did at Balaklava. Of sailors as of soldiers it is true : 

" Theirs not to reason why, 
Theirs not to make reply, 
Theirs but to do and die." 

And when, in the awful emergencies of ocean life which have 
overtaken them among icebergs or the cyclone, 

Billows " to right of them," 
Billows "to left of them," 
Billows " in front of them 
" Volleyed and thundered." 

Midst storm "like shot and shell 
Boldly they " sailed " and well, 
Into the jaws of death, 
Into the mouth of hell," 
Many a " Six Hundred." 

If they had been soldiers a laureate would have sung their 
praises ; but, being only sailors, no one sings : 

"Honor the brave and bold ; 
Long shall the tale be told — 
Yes, when our babes are old — 
How they sailed onward." 

Alas ! shall it always be true that men are most ungrateful to their 
greatest benefactors ? Or is it that the sailor is such a creditor that 
we have no power sufficient to comprehend the debt, and reserve 
our gratitude for benefactions that are sufficiently small to be ap- 
preciable ? 

5. When the gentleman whom we shall probably agree to pro- 
nounce the chief of the men of science America has produced proj- 



266 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

cctcd " the wind and current charts," they were placed in the 
hands of every navigator who would take them, so that the obser- 
vations of as many persons as possible, at as many times as possi- 
ble, and in as many places as possible might be discussed, so that 
the results might be presented in charts " for the improvement of 
commerce and navigation." The value of this plan attracted more 
and more attention, until in a few years the United States, Great 
Britain, France, Russia, Sweden, Norway, Holland, Denmark, Bel- 
gium, Portugal, Spain, Prussia, Sardinia, the Pontifical States, the 
free city of Hamburg, the republics of Bremen and Chili, and the 
empires of Austria and Brazil were all co-operating on the same 
plan of observation. Lieutenant Maury well says : 

" Rarely before has there been such a sublime spectacle pre- 
sented to the scientific world — all nations agreeing to unite and co- 
operate in carrying out one system of philosophical research with 
regard to the sea. Though they may be enemies in all else here 
they are to be friends. Every ship that navigates the high seas 
with these charts and blank abstract logs on board may henceforth 
be regarded as a floating observatory, a temple of science. The in- 
struments used by every co-operating vessel are to be compared 
with standards that are common to all ; so that an observation that 
is made anywhere and in any ship may be referred to and compared 
with all similar observations by all other ships in all parts of the 
world." 

Dear Christian brethren, is not this a profound and sublime 
lesson for us ? Suppose we could make all the sailors of Chris- 
tendom real workers for Christ, how soon the world would be re- 
generated ! Will the world ever be Christianized while our sailors 
are so neglected ? We can never forget the exciting words of the 
prophet Isaiah (lx., 4, 5), in which he addresses the Church : u Then 
shalt thou see and brighten up, and thy heart shall throb and swell 
because the abundance (or multitude) of the sea shall be converted unto 
thee, and the forces of the Gentiles (or the nations) shall come unto 
thee!' Look at the comparatively feeble results of modern mis- 
sionary effort. Why is it ? Why, brethren, so long as we attempt 
to Christianize a foreign continent or island of the sea by sending 
over a ship containing two missionaries, twenty hogsheads of New 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 267 

England rum, and a crew of profane, drunken, licentious sailors, 
we never shall Christianize those people. While the two missiona- 
ries are learning the rudiments of the language the sailors will have 
made such an impression of Christianity upon the natives as a 
generation of preachers cannot erase. No, my brethren ; we cannot 
have the world won to Jesus while our sailors belong to the service 
of Satan. To the end that they be enlisted for Christ the energies 
of Christendom must be turned to the conversion of its sailors. 
Do you not believe that if every man that left every port were 
truly, simply, earnestly, a real servant of Jesus, a witness for Christ, 
an example of the power of Christian principles upon human 
character, you would have little need of missionary societies? These 
marine missionaries would set the continents and kingdoms and 
islands of the world on fire at their edges, and the breath of the 
Spirit of God would blow the sacred flames inward until the glow 
and brightness of that conflagration should consume the corruption 
of the world and fill the heavens with the light of its glory. I do 
believe that the words of Isaiah were spoken in logical order as 
well as in poetic splendor. I do believe that the forces of the 
Gentiles shall not come to our Zion until first the abundance of the 
sea be converted to her. Let us turn our powers, our energies, our 
will, our faith, our love, our prayers, toward these too-long 
neglected men ; let us enlist them for truth and the Lord's 
Church, and then, instead of the stillness which is upon the nations 
and the feeble echoes which come to us from abroad, we shall be 
able to shout what it were false to sing to-night: 

" Hark ! the song of jubilee 
Loud as mighty thunders roar, 
Or the fullness of the sea 
When it breaks upon the shore ; 
Hallelujah ! for the Lord 
God Omnipotent doth reign ; 
Hallelujah ! let the word 
Echo round the earth and main." 



2 68 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 

[The Forty-fourth Anniversary of the American Tract Society was held in the Madison Square Pres«= 
byterian Church, Rev. Dr: Adams, pastor, on Tuesday, the nth of May, 1869. The right Rev. Bishop 
Mcllvane presided. On the topic of Union Colportage in the South, the Rev. Dr. Deems, on a signal from 
the venerable Bishop, arose and said :] 

I must be allowed, Mr. President, to follow the example of Dr. 
Adams, Dr. Schenck, and Dr. Prime, and intimate that I have been 
called to speak upon this topic by the officers of this Society, and 
am not a volunteer. And I rejoice in the opportunity to express 
my pleasure at learning that of the agencies of the American Tract 
Society that at the South is the very largest. The great liberality 
of the Society toward that section of our country is to be justified 
and still greater liberality urged on grounds some of which I shall 
attempt briefly to indicate : 

I. The general present impoverished condition and the prospect- 
ive great wealth of that land. There is no way of bringing to the 
mind of a people who have not been desolated by a war the inde- 
scribable poverty of the people of the South when our war closed. 
One must have been of them, with all his interests involved in the 
individual and general interests of the people, to know how grind- 
ing is the poverty which follows a general state of wealth or com- 
fort. Then the total derangement of business, the compulsion to 
make all their fresh business connections with those with whom 
they had been at war, the immense change in the department of 
labor, bringing on a condition of affairs with which no one had ever 
been familiar, must, in the nature of things, cause, and, for a season, 
continue, a state of poverty. In such a case men will not buy books, 
certainly not religious books. And yet they need the instruction 
and consolation of religious books all the more in their depression. 
The charitable element of this Society would, therefore, impel it to 
deal liberally with what is now the poorest and must become the 
richest portion of our great common country. Out of their great 
trial of affliction the Southern people are to rise to greatest wealth. 
The climate, the soil, the staple products, are such that men with 
the American blood in them cannot live there and not grow rich. 
Give those people three successive crops of cotton like the last, and 
the wealth of the gold of the land must gravitate toward their 
pockets. Clothes are an important element of civilization. Who 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 269 

walks the grand docks of Liverpool, or the almost palatial factories 
of New England, or the thronged levees of New Orleans, without 
feeling that, whether he likes it or not, whether labor be white or 
black, bond or free, " Cotton is king," and the throne of the ma- 
terial king of civilization of the world is in the Southern States of 
America. Before the people of the South become rich again — and 
who can imagine their vast wealth a half-century to come ? — my 
own soul is most anxious that all the appliances of religious cult- 
ure be afforded them. 

2. Another ground is the total, violent, and sudden revolution of 
society in the South. One effect of that has been the shaking of 
men's faith. When men, rightly or wrongly, have honestly and re- 
ligiously espoused a cause with all their hearts, and made it their 
supreme cause, giving up their time, their property, their brains, 
their children, their lives to it, and there comes a failure, the first 
feeling is that all the courses of nature are out of joint and justice 
has clean fled the universe of God. That was the case of the 
people of the South when the war closed. On one hand the infi- 
delity was appalling, on the other the apathy was disheartening. 
Now, God be thanked, a re-action has commenced. The self-deny- 
ing labors of the ministers of all Churches have been an argument on 
the other side. The sufferings of the people have begun to bear 
fruit unto holiness. A learned and distinguished Southern Bishop 
informed me last week that he had just closed a long and laborious 
tour of preaching, and that from all over that land there came ex- 
pressions of desire to hear the word of God preached. When God 
turns up the soil by any plow-share many a flower perishes, but 
a place is made for the sowing of the seed of truth. It is just the 
time, and the people are in just the condition, to have a great cir- 
culation of such books as bring the realities of the spiritual and 
eternal world down among the gross cares and bitter sufferings of 
the people. 

There has not been time, nor have the people had the means since 
the war, to organize any proper or effective school system. The 
children are left without books. I shall never forget the delight in 
the eyes of some children, who had learned to read after the blockade 
had been established, when, at the cessation of hostilities, they had 



270 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



spread before them a few volumes of the Tract Society's publica- 
tions, printed with fair type on brilliantly white paper, and illus- 
trated with what seemed to them transcendently splendid pictures. 
To this day in very many sections such books would be received 
with childish rapture. In those sections the word of God is as yet 
seldom preached. The books of this Society would be district 
school, Sunday-school, and Church, to thousands of these 
lambs of Christ's flock. The report of your Society shows that 
much has been done, and fifty years from now these children will 
be the nabobs of America. The South has come North in the last 
few years begging. I venture to predict that in fifty years the 
whole state of affairs will be changed, and the South will mainly 
support the country. 

If we were not stimulated by the lofty charity of our holy faith 
commercial sagacity should teach the American Tract Society, and 
every other society that calls itself " American," to befriend in their 
poverty those who, when they come to their estate, are to be their 
chief supporters and friends. 

And then there are our new fellow-citizens, the freedmen, 
so-called, who have immense claims upon every Christian man, 
North and South. No matter whether we like it or dislike it, they 
are citizens, and have all the rights 3.nd pozvers of citizens ; and self- 
preservation should teach us to have every power duly regulated. 
They must be religiously educated. That was important when they 
were slaves ; it is indispensable now that they are citizens. Every 
right-minded man in the South feels and acknowledges that. And 
it is not literary and political instruction they so much need as 
moral culture ; having which they will attain as much of the mental 
training as they are capable of receiving — a proposition which I be- 
lieve to be as true of negroes as of white people. Many of the 
books of the American Tract Society are such as would captivate 
these new citizens and lay broad foundations for their future up- 
building. Before emancipation hundreds of ministers of the Gos- 
pel devoted themselves to labors among the colored people ; the 
heads of thousands of families every week, many every day, read 
and expounded the word of God to their servants. Larger sums of 
money were spent upon their religious instruction than the Chris- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 2 ?I 

tian world generally knows. But now their former friends are too 
poor to help them. They are an orphaned people ; how orphaned 
only those know who have seen them before and since. They need 
the care of all good men ; and with all their faults, when we con- 
sider how the people of that race have conducted themselves under 
all the trying circumstances of war and change from slavery to 
widest freedom, I venture to say that they deserve very considerate 
treatment. In any event it is the duty of every Christian organiza- 
tion to give them such help as shall keep them from becoming an 
ulcer in the body of the Commonwealth. 

3. Lastly, the Tract Society has a ground of liberality toward 
the South occupied by every wise and good man and every 
truly Christian association at the North. It is found in the need 
that exists to heal the sores of the country. We never can re- 
construct by laws and conventions. Kindness is the cement of 
hearts. His Christianity teaches every good man at the South to do 
every kind thing he possibly can for every Northern man, good or 
bad, first, because he has been his enemy, and, second, because only 
thus can a genuine reconciliation take place. The very same reasons 
should still more strongly influence every Northern man and every 
Northern society, because the people of the South are the con- 
quered party and are suffering from defeat. We must not argue 
over the question. It must not be reviewed. It does not matter 
just now who was right and who was wrong: both are dreadfully 
hurt and must be healed. Let us get well, and then for the logic of 
the case. And for these wounds there are no balms like the oil of 
good deeds and kindnesses. 

Mr. President, it was my fortune to be in the Confederacy through 
the whole conflict. When the clash of arms ceased I fell imme- 
diately to the w r ork of reconstructing the churches in my district in 
Eastern Carolina. I reached the town of Beaufort in my tour, and 
the next morning at the breakfast-table of the boarding-house I sat 
beside a courteous gentleman whom I was not long in discovering 
to be the Rev. Dr. Stevenson, one of the Secretaries of the Ameri- 
can Tract Society ; and when I learned the object of his coming 
my heart warmed toward the good man and toward the Society. 
He was the first dove with an olive-branch that seemed to me to 



2 ; 2 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

come back from over the waters of the destructive deluge. By my 
feelings then in that little southern seaport I know in this great 
city now, right reverend sir, that our duty is to cultivate loving- 
ness, to prove that Christian love is stronger than sectional hate, and 
that there is no skill in politics nor sagacity in philosophy like the 
simple power of loving hearts. 

On these grounds, Mr. President, I rejoice in all the American 
Tract Society has done in the South, and urge that still more be 
done, in the hope and belief that thus you will vindicate your claim 
to being an American society and constitute yourselves another 
bond which shall hold together these great States. They cannot be 
bound together by any laws or compacts, for they are freemen and 
American, but they can be held together by the almighty cohesion 
of love. Thus God rules the universe, and thus all who are wise 
will seek to influence their fellow-men. 

I would have all men feel the force of the truth of the saying in 
the great speech of the Spanish orator Castelar, recently delivered 
in the Cortes : " The religion of power is great, but the religion of 
love is greater." 



AN ADDRESS 



Delivered at unveiling of a monument to the unknown Confederate dead, Hopkinsville, Ky., 

May 19, 1887 : 

Fellow-Citizens : 

An occasion like this may become a mere spectacular exhibition, 
or be made an event of fruitful importance. If we merely look at 
this great throng of human beings, in which are so many fair 
women and brave men, and at the noble shaft erected by one of 
Kentucky's gallant sons* to the memory of his unknown departed 
comrades, and at the ceremonials which have been arranged to cel- 
ebrate a deed which unites munificence to patriotism, the whole 
affair will soon melt away like the vanishing magnificence and 
beauties of a mirage. I venture to say that I know our friend who 
causes this monument to be erected, and I know him too well to 
believe that his is a nature to be moved to such an act by the child- 

* John C Latham, Esq., of New York. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



273 



ish fancy of making a mere pageant in his native town. He could 
not have desired me to come away from the important and sacred 
duties of my post in a city fifteen hundred miles distant simply to 
be another voice added to the uproar. No, fellow-citizens ; if our 
acts and words this day do not connect the things of this present 
with those of the future, which will be another present when we 
have all passed away, we may have a day of talk and parade, but it 
will be a barren day — a thing human life is too precious to afford. 

Fellow-citizens, there are many of us who remember when a war 
was rag-ino- in this land. It was a terrible conflict. It tore families 
asunder and arrayed brothers in hostility. It snapped the cord 
which had held States together for more than half a century. It 
plowed the land as if it would tear up every root which could ever 
produce flowers or fruits. But all things that begin must end. That 
storm of war was at last exhausted, but after the winds ceased 
blowing the waves for a season kept rolling, and even now there is 
a slight movement on the surface. So great is the force of habit 
that we occasionally hear the phrase " the late war." Now, fellow- 
citizens, let us think a little. There has been no " late war " in this 
country. Have you heard of any battle in the last twenty years? 
I have not. The latest firing I heard was in the noble old State of 
North Carolina, which did not come into the Union until months 
after George Washington's inauguration as President, and being last 
to come in at first, was last to go out when the break came, and the 
first to come back at the last. Yes, I heard those final firings of 
the war — and all the male children who were born that day in Caro- 
lina and Kentucky had the right to vote at the late presidential and 
gubernatorial elections! Now I ask whether, in view of that single 
fact, we old men at least should not drop the misleading phrase, 
" the late war." There has been no late war. Since hostilities ceased 
nearly a quarter of a century has elapsed. Two thirds of the time 
allotted to a human generation surely should be sufficient to build 
men's fortunes from the foundation, and to rebuild fortunes that had 
been cut down. Have not the best things men have done been 
accomplished in twenty years? The men, North and South, who 
have not been able to reconstruct their affairs into a reasonable form 

of prosperity, would they be able to do so if they had centuries ? 
18 



274 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



Let us, then, cease from all unavailing regrets for the irrevocable 
past and address ourselves manfully to the practical present and 
the possible future. 

One of the most fruitful sources of human unhappiness is found 
in our failure to adjust ourselves to the inevitable and irreversible 
laws of the universe. Sometimes this is done from want of will, 
and sometimes from want of thought. Has not time enough elapsed 
to allow us to think without passion on what the dominant causes 
of the war were, and what will finally be the outcome ? I think 
we may, especially here on this border-ground, and more especially 
here beside the quiet dead, whose memory we can never let die. 
Our admiration for their heroism, our reverence for their martyr- 
dom, and our tenderness for their memory will all be increased by 
such a study. 

And all the more may we do this because the monument we un- 
veil to-day has been erected to the Unknown Confederate Dead. 
If it were to a single Confederate dead hero — to St. Stonewall Jack- 
son, to Sir Albert Sydney Johnston, or to that other, that greatest 
American since Washington, that man who, amid reverses, outgrew 
all titles of honor invented in Church and State, that man of whom 
the muse of history now thinks, and will hereafter speak, as simple 
Robert E. Lee — if it were to any one of these this monument were 
unveiled to-day the greatness of the individual might draw our at- 
tention from the cause he represented to himself, as some bright 
particular star draws our eyes to its own brilliancy and away from 
the great expanse in which it moves and shines. 

We are submitted to the power of no such abstraction to-day. 
The men to whose glory this column is to stand are men whose 
names are so lost in the cause they represent that not only have 
they no such tombstone distinction as is enjoyed by those who lie 
where the forefathers of their hamlet sleep, but are men of whom 
all trace is lost, even the initials of their names. 

It has been suggested that it is appropriate to have an address 
on this occasion from the pastor of the Church of the Strangers. 
Here are the bodies of more than one hundred men. These men 
were strangers in this place ; not one of them when alive was 
known to a single inhabitant of Hopkinsville, and not one of them 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 275 

when dead could be designated by any mark that should distinguish 
him from any of his comrades. Strangers to one another, coming 
from different States, and many of them from different denomina- 
tions of Christians, united only by their ardent love for a common 
cause and by their rest at last in a common grave, it is meet and 
right that the pastor of the Church of the Strangers should speak a 
word for his poor, mute parishioners whom even the baptism of 
blood has left unnamed. 

It is an unnatural thing for a man to die of violence, away from 
home, and where strangers give a grave to eyes that had no friendly 
hand to draw down those curtains that shall rise no more upon the 
sights of land or sea or sky. It is a most unnatural thing when 
multitudes of men so perish. 

What led to the war that swept the men of the two opposing 
armies away like autumn leaves? 

Will the final outcome of the conflict repay the immense 
outlay ? 

Let us calmly consider these two questions. Lifting ourselves 
for a little season away from our own land and our own times we 
may see that through the history of our race there runs a purpose 
which is worked upon a plan. Only dimly in the ages have the 
poets, the seers, the prophets detected either plan or purpose ; 
but now we 

" doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, 
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns." 

It was the failure to detect that divine purpose, that sublime plan, 
which for centuries allowed the vast energies of our humanity to be 
expended 'along narrow lines and in small fields. It was this igno- 
rance which allowed even great souls — souls grown too great for 
personal selfishness — to find relief in what they believed to be un- 
selfishness ; namely, in national and ecclesiastical selfishness. 

Thus it has come to pass that many a man, whose heart was a 
fountain sending forth a stream too ample to be contained in the 
little pond of his own personal selfishness, has found larger outlet 
and a larger lake in the sickly sectarianism of conflicting churches 
and the pinched patriotism of national animosities. It was on 
account of this that, from the times of our old Hebrew and Homeric 



2 ;6 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

predecessors down to our own times, the face of our planet has been 
striped 

" With the standards of the people plunging through the thunder-storm." 

It was in the midst of this debasing process, and at a time when, 
so far from advancing from a brute to a savage and from a savage 
to a saint, man had sunk to his lowest point and had concluded the 
demonstration of the survival of the most unfit possible, that 
the world saw in human shape one who claimed to be the Prince 
of Peace ; one who taught that Jew should love Samaritan, and 
Carthaginian should love Roman, and every patriot should love 
his national enemy. The world of his time could not know him. 
He was not a world product. He came by no evolution. But 
never since he came has the world ceased to feel him. Science 
and philosophy, examining him by eighteen century tests, now 
unite in declaring him the result of extra-human processes. And 
yet, even after his advent, the din of war had gone on until, in this 
nineteenth century, the spirit of that young Galilean poet- 
preacher-martyr, brooding over the people, began to make them 
have a dim perception of what at last looked like a heavenly picture 
to the eyes of a poet of our own day, who gazed and listened 

"Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled 
In the parliament of man, the federation of the world." 

This is not the dream of a sickly sentimentalist ; it is the vision 
seen only when a man is beating his most healthy soul-pulses. It 
is the goal to which every army corps of humanity is tending march 
how it will — with lightest steps or heaviest tread, at double-quick or 
loitering between many a shorter or longer halt. 

" The Federation of the World." Why, fellow-citizens, those 
five words sketch the everlasting plan of the Infinite Architect for 
building the vast and splendid structure of humanity which he 
means to stand on infinity and oversplendor the cycles of eternity, 
and which he means to inhabit — because he is too great a God to 
dwell in temples made with hands, and even God must have 
some home! 

Now, fellow-citizens, we begin to see that for the great world- 
consummation there must be preparatory studies. There were 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 277 

none before American history opened, if you do not count a single 
premature abortive suggestion of an attempt among the Greeks. 
The god-great idea to be realized is the complex thought of things 
ivortliy of union worthily united. This divine thought is shown else- 
where in nature. It shines in marriage. Ravening beasts may 
herd together ; but their nature is too base for marriage. Innocent 
birds are permitted to build and coo and to mate and feed their 
birdlings; but their nature is too weak for wedlock. Even bad men 
and bad women can find no initiation into the most sacred mysteries 
of connubial love. So all these live apart, even though they stay 
in the same lair, or nest, or house, while those, and only those, whom 
God has joined together can no man put asunder. 

The same principle prevails in the growth of civic life. There 
must be States before there can be United States. A State is not a 
herd, a multitude, a mob — it is a community in which true individ- 
ual liberty is secured by common law maintained and administrated 
against that licentiousness which is liberty's most virulent enemy. 
On this continent providentially the complex problem is getting 
itself worked out for the benefit of the whole world. There were, 
first of all, communities brought from different localities, having had 
different antecedents. These had time to consolidate into States. 
Nearness suggests union. So also does a common interest. We 
are soon brought to the question how far this can extend. The 
student of the philosophy of history has seen nothing more clearly 
demonstrated than the impractibility of a universal empire. From 
the earliest times, from the days of the builders on the plains of 
Shinar, and the age of the Macedonian conquerors, to the uprising 
of Napoleon, men have had dreams of an empire which should be 
co-extensive with the planet. Every effort to compass so grand a 
design has been abortive. It has not been, it is not now, it is prob- 
ably never to be, that one government shall embrace and control 
all the dwellers on the face of the earth. 

But from the beginnings of history in America there has been the 
prediction of a union of self-governing States covering the continent. 
All men see that so great is the extent of territory and so diversified 
the climatic influences even in North America alone, that if it were 
suddenly populated by a homogeneous people two' centuries would 



278 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

work such changes that the dwellers beside the St. Lawrence would 
be greatly differentiated from the cultivators of the delta of the 
Mississippi. The same is true of South America, of Europe, of 
Africa, and Asia, considering each by itself alone. The problem to 
be solved is the formation of a government elastic enough to suit all 
sections and strong enough to hold all together for the needed co-operation 
and progress. 

Let any man now calmly study our antecedents, and he must see, 
we think, that not an empire, not an autocracy, not a limited mon- 
archy, would realize this great ideal, but States united, not welded 
but fluent, each as perfectly free for discharging the functions of 
statedom by securing the liberties and promoting the progress of 
its people as if it were the only State upon the globe, while it was 
so bound to all the other States upon the continent that they could 
not exist without her nor she without them. 

Plainly this great ideal is not to be realized by one generation, 
but by many. All the experiments of peace and war must be tried 
before this great result can be reached. It is quite easy to perceive 
how there might be many who would see more clearly the value of 
the union than that of constitutional liberty, and how there might 
be others in whose eyes the union of States would be to the liberty 
of States as the casket is to the crown jewel it contains, or the 
human body to its spiritual inhabitant. 

It seems to me, fellow-citizens, that here was the source of our 
difficulties and the real cause of the civil war which raged a quarter 
of a century ago. Nor do I see how that war could have been 
avoided ; therefore I cannot conclude that it was useless, although 
it slew my boy, my first-born. Wherefore I come to-day, in the 
presence of these dead men, men who died and got no human 
glory by the dying, to ask you and myself whether the outcome is 
to repay the country and the world for the immense and precious 
outlay. 

Watching the progress of events since the war closed, and more 
and more dispassionately studying the problem, I am prepared to 
answer, " Verily, I believe it will." 

The men who fought the battles, the privates, the rank and file — 
of whom one hundred and one are sleeping near this stately monu- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 279 

men t — and those who fought against them who have been carried 
for their last repose to the cemetery at Fort Donelson, were 
martyrs, every born American of them, and we have no right to say 
they were not sincere and honest as we know they were self-sacri- 
ficing martyrs. That certainly must be the opinion of our friend 
whose design was to erect this monument to the Unknown Dead 
of both sides. They bore witness to a truth, each side to a 
truth. 

Fellow-citizens, when shall we rise above the low thought that 
always when two men fight each other they are probably both 
wrong or that one certainly is wrong? That is not true. We do 
not need the fable of the two knights drawing swords in deadly con- 
flict on the question of the color of a shield, and finding, after their 
fight, that both were right — since the shield was blue, as one affirmed, 
and white, as the other contended. A shield that has two sides may 
have two colors, and be at once both white and blue. If men should 
go to war because one part maintained that our planet is held to its 
orbit by centripetal, while the other contended that it is held by 
centrifugal force, would they not each be wrong, while both were 
right ? 

So it seems to me it was in our civil war. It would be an error 
to suppose that the people of the South hated the Union. So far 
is that from being true that one of the causes of the temporary 
animosity of multitudes of Southerners to the North was because 
they believed that the North was pursuing a course which would 
destroy the Union, knowing themselves to be so devoted to con- 
stitutional liberty that they would not remain, unless compelled, in 
any union in which that was not paramount. It would be equally 
erroneous to suppose that the people of the North were indifferent 
to constitutional liberty. One of the causes of their hatred of the 
South was the belief that the South was about to destroy what 
seemed to them the only hope for constitutional liberty in this land. 
And so both sides appealed to arms, and through four years of 
bitterness and blackness a war was waged on a prodigious scale. It 
ended with what contribution to civilization? This: the world's 
treasury of heroism and martyrdom was enriched by the warriors 
on both sides. Each section regards the other this day as a 



280 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

grander people than any other on the face of the globe, and each 
strives to surpass the other in devout loyalty to the Union. 

We have learned, and we have taught the world, that the Union 
is absolutely worthless except as a preserver of liberty, and that 
the liberty of the States cannot be preserved without the union of 
the States. These two propositions embrace the most important 
and the most lofty political generalization reached by human 
science. 

What powerful things are words ! There is something — there is 
much — in names. To me it seems most fortunate that our forefathers 
baptized our country "The United States." They gave it a name 
in which is packed all that is most precious in political philosophy. 
If we had been called Columbia or Washingtonia, or any such name, 
the progress of the world would have been retarded for centuries. 

" Liberty and Union," said Daniel Webster ; but that was shown 
to be impracticable, and then a war was waged which changed 
Webster's phrase slightly in verbiage but immensely in sense, so 
that our national motto henceforth must be, " Liberty in Union," 
now and forever. 

The thunder and lightning of our war, fellow-citizens, attracted 
the attention of the civilized world. Men every-where have been 
studying it. We have proved ourselves capable of being the be- 
ginning of the " federation of the world." We have made it 
possible for Englishmen every-where to agitate and discuss the 
question of a federation of those States which have been gradually 
forming under the aegis of Great Britain. We can begin to hope 
that, following such imperial British federation, some day, it may 
be a far day, but some day, the world will look upon United 
States of Europe. And while that is coming there will be States 
growing in Asia and in Africa. When they shall reach political 
marriageable age there will be United States on each continent, and 
after that the day of days will dawn, the day on which, in some 
earth metropolis, shall be opened the first session of the " Parlia- 
ment of Man." 

To that august consummation the greatest contribution ever 
made since the world began came from the two imposing armies 
of our civil war. And as houses, cities, States, institutions of all 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 28 1 

kinds among men have always owed very much more to men whose 
names have been lost than to those whose names have been pre- 
served, so to the unknown Federal and Confederate dead the world 
will always be a greater debtor than to Grant, to Sherman, and to 
Meade, or to those other three great generals, Robert E. Lee and 
Stonewall Jackson and Albert Sydney Johnston. 

And you, O, my silent brothers, sleeping unnamed in this quiet 
tomb, under this noble monument, you fought a good fight for 
something much more precious than any treasured thought of yours, 
and quite as sacred as your altars and your fires ; you fought for all 
the altars worth erecting anywhere, and for all the fires worth kin- 
dling in any age ; you fought for that which makes the mortal life of 
man a worthy vestibule to human immortality. And our friend 
who hath caused this beautiful monument to rise on this fair spot, 
it seems to me, has " builded better than he knew." He has ex- 
pressed his own manly sense of manliness and gallant sense of 
gallantry, and said that the names of heroes may become unknown 
but heroism shall not go unacknowledged among men. He has 
done more. In days to come, when he and you and I shall be in 
the camps where these departed soldiers have pitched their tents, 
groups of boys shall stand before this monument and study its pro- 
portions and read its eloquent inscription, and ponder its meaning, 
and gather from their older friends its deeper lessons. As they 
learn that men were ready to leave venerable fathers and mothers, 
beautiful sisters and sweethearts, dearest children and wives, to 
abandon trades and fields, to forsake the paths of social dalliance 
and delights, and endure the hardships of camps, hospitals, and of 
battle-fields, and to die at last, not only unsung but unnamed, and 
to do all this because fair Liberty is so beautiful and so sweet ; as 
they learn this those boys will grow into men not all unworthy to 
be successors of the blessed dead. 

Fellow-citizens, we are favored to-day. We have lived to see the 
animosities of the war die out, to witness famous generals of both 
armies marching side by side in the processions of peace, to behold 
Confederate leaders mourning at the death of generals of the Federal 
armies, and great captains who led the Union forces sorrowfully 
placing chaplets on the graves of their great opponents. The blood 



282 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

of the martyrs is the seed of the Church and the blood of the 

patriots is the seed of the State. 

Cold though those blood-seed lie, 

Through winter long and drear, 
They do not wholly die ; 

They surely re-appear. 

They spring again to make the land rich and beautiful with those 
flowers and fruits which they contained. 

And now, fellow-citizens, this day we do two things. We erect 
a monument to the memory of one past generation and open a 
school of patriotism for the culture of heroism in many a generation 
to come. A beauty and a benediction, child of patriotic gratitude, 
parent of heroism, long stand John Campbell Latham's monument 
to the Unknown Confederate Dead ! 

Sleep, brothers, sleep, beneath the monument unveiled by the 
hands of purest little maidens, whose souls were still with God when 
your souls went back to him ! 

Stand, shaft of beauty, stand ! Come from the heart of New 
England to rest on the bosom of the South, thou hast shot up into 
the midday beneath a heaven deeper and more beautiful than 
Italian skies, and from beneath the stars and stripes of the one flag 
of our one country! 

Wave, banner, wave ! 

" When Freedom, from her mountain height, 

Unfurled her standard to the air, 
She tore the azure robe of night, 

And set the stars of glory there. 
She mingled with its gorgeous dyes 
The milky baldric of the skies, 
And striped its pure, celestial white 
With streakings of the morning light. 
Then from his mansion in the sun 
She called her eagle bearer down 
And gave into his mighty hand 
Thy symbol of her chosen land. 

Forever float that standard sheet ! 

Where breathes the foe but falls before us, 
With Freedom's soil beneath our feet " — 

And the flag of our Union streaming o'er us ! 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 283 



CHIPS FROM A LECTURER'S WORKSHOP. 

[In this department are inserted a few things which seem to promise to have 
more than an ephemeral interest.] 



PROFESSOR HUXLEY'S LECTURES. 

According to announcement, Professor Huxley arrived in America 
and on the night of September 18, 1875, at Chickering Hall, de- 
livered the first of his series of lectures on the " Evidences of Evo- 
lution." This was followed by two others during the same week. 
Interest in the subject drew some, interest in the lecturer drew 
more, and these united with a general curiosity to furnish the pro- 
fessor with a large and attentive audience. 

In personal appearance we found his face like his portraits, his 
shoulders bent as by the posture of a worker at the desk, and his 
hair slightly sprinkled with silver. He made almost no gestures. 
He rested with both elbows on the desk and bore his whole weight 
upon it, so that in the act of speaking he created an accompaniment 
by the creaking of the pulpit. His voice is of small compass but 
quite pleasant, his intonations free from that intolerable affectation 
which so many Englishmen have inherited from their fathers, who 
copied the elocutionary vices of the " First Gentleman in Europe." 
The professor seemed to use no notes, his language appeared 
extempore, yet the sentences were generally elegant, and, in many 
instances, admirably wrought, and as ready for the press as patient 
study could have made them. His style is singularly lucid, and 
large parts of the lectures were delivered as by a man in close but 
not laborious thought talking to himself, or, with closed qyqs, dic- 
tating to an amanuensis. He is the Moody of science, and visited 
America on an evangelical excursion in behalf of the new gospel of 
evolution. 

What has been the result of his tour? 

So far as we can perceive, only this : that very many persons have 
had the gratification of hearing a distinguished man speak. He 
has shaken the faith of no one, he has confirmed the faith of no one. 



284 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

Those who believe with him believed as much before as since his 
advent. Christian people have been in no manner moved. 

In regard to religious thinkers, it may be just as well to say here 
that their religion has nothing at all at stake in the settlement of 
this question. St. John can very readily be conceived as an evolu- 
tionist. Evolution, as Professor Huxley taught, demands a begin- 
ning, and stands as much as any other system in opposition to the 
hypothesis of the eternity of man. There was a beginning. John 
says, " In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God." 
Evolution merely pushes the date of "the beginning" back into a 
period no more indefinite than that assumed in any part of the 
Bible. Whatever may have been the beginning of the beginning, 
all beginnings require a beginner, and whoever that beginner is is 
God, whatever have been the processes through which that change 
was first begun, which has continued to grow until it has flowered 
out into the present condition of things. So far as a Christian man 
is concerned, he can join that same Apostle John in saying, " Be- 
loved, now are we the sons of God." It is quite possible to be a 
Christian and adopt the hypothesis of evolution ; it is quite possible 
to be a Christian and to reject it ; just as it was as possible to be a 
Christian when scientific men held the Ptolemaic system of astron- 
omy as when they substituted the Copernican. Why should it not 
be so? It is possible to be a scientific man and reject the theory of 
evolution. Some of the ablest scientists living do so now. It is 
possible to be a scientific man and accept the hypothesis, because 
evidently Professor Huxley, who is a scientific man, is an evolu- 
tionist. It is purely a question of intellectual interest. 

Our own opinion is that if the body of thinkers now living were 
empaneled as a jury, and forced to an immediate decision, they 
would render the Scotch verdict, " Not proven." * That does not, 
however, imply that proof shall not come in hereafter. This court 
must sit always open, and witnesses may at any time be sworn. No 
man, so far as we know, has the slightest religious interest in having 
the hypothesis established or exploded. 

To us, then, it seemed gratuitous, not to say, impertinent, in 

* This afterward became the title of a tractate republished in this volume, p. 75, 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 285 

Professor Huxley to go out of his way to offend people who did 
him the honor to pay profound attention to the delivery of his 
lectures, and who spent five dollars for the prvilege, but who still 
hold to those faiths which are clung to by the greatest scientists of 
the present age, as well as the past ages, and by the great multitude 
of the best living men and women on earth. If he will only prove 
evolution to be true we shall all gladly receive it ; but if he utterly 
fail, as he did most conspicuously in his recent course of lectures in 
New York, to furnish any proof of this hypothesis, these thinkers 
are not to be converted by a sneer, nor are they to have their 
respect increased for Professor Huxley by a quibble. 

The professor set forth in the beginning that, in this matter, 
there were three hypotheses, and only three : 

So far as I know there are only three views — three hypotheses — which ever have 
been entertained, or which well can be entertained, respecting the past history of 
nature. 

Upon the first of these the assumption is that the order of nature which now 
obtains has always obtained ; in other words, that the present course of nature, 
the present order of things, has existed from all eternity. The second hypothesis 
is that the present state of things, the present order of nature, has had only a 
limited duration, and that at some period in the past the state of things which we 
now know — substantially, though not, of course, in all its details, the state of things 
which we now know— arose and came into existence without any precedent similar 
condition from which it could have proceeded. The third hypothesis also assumes 
that the present order of nature has had but a limited duration, but it supposes 
that the present order of things proceeded by a natural process from an antecedent 
order, and that from another antecedent order,«and so on ; and that on this hy- 
pothesis the attempt to fix any limit at which we could assign the commencement 
of this series of changes is given up. 

This was an astounding acknowledgment of ignorance. Did Pro- 
fessor Huxley never hear of a fourth hypothesis? Where has he 
lived, to have grown up to half a century in age and not learned 
that some of the ablest university professors and Christian teachers 
distinctly hold a fourth hypothesis? If the professor was sincere 
he does not know enough of the history of thought to lecture. If 
he was not sincere he was behaving superciliously toward those 
scientific men who are at least his equals. 

The first of these hypotheses he named was of course quickly 
dispatched. No one now has any interest in it. When he came to 
state the second hypothesis he took the whole audience by sur- 



286 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

prise by saying, " that is the doctrine which you will find stated most 
fully and clearly in the immortal poem of John Milton's English 
Divina Commedia" He made no allusion to the Bible. He gave 
his countrymen the credit of discovering and originating the second 
hypothesis, namely, that of creation, and the great apostle of evolu- 
tion crosses three thousand miles of ocean to knock an English 
poet's fancies of the cosmos on the head ! Perhaps Professor Hux- 
ley will never know how much and how rapidly he sank in the 
estimation of thoughtful people who had entertained admiration 
for him. Either John Milton's account of the creation is identical 
with that of the Bible or it is not. If it is not, the attitude of Pro- 
fessor Huxley, in ignoring a fourth hypothesis, is simply ridiculous. 
If it is, the making of John Milton solely and solitarily responsible 
for the present prevalent belief in the origin of the cosmos, when it 
had existed, as the world knows, over three thousand years in the 
most ancient writings in any literature, looks to us like " an artful 
dodge," indicative of cowardice. Now we do not believe Professor 
Huxley to be a coward, and, therefore, we heard these words of his 
with real sorrow. It was a great mistake. But if he does believe 
that Milton's poem is a fair statement of biblical cosmogony he 
cannot set it aside lightly. President Dawson, of Montreal, is Mr. 
Huxley's equal as a scientific man, and so is Professor Gray, of 
Harvard, and so is Professor Guyot, of Princeton, and so is Pro- 
fessor Winchell, of Vanderbilt ; and all these, his compeers, have 
contributed as much to the advancement of science and are as well 
acquainted with the latest developments of science as Professor 
Huxley ; and they all believe that nothing yet settled in science 
goes toward unsettling the account given in Genesis. 

The professor then took up the evolution hypothesis, which he 
stated thus : 

Evolution supposes that at any given period in the past we should meet with 
a state of things more or less similar to the present, but less similar in pro- 
portion as we go back in time ; that the physical form of the earth could be 
traced back in this way to a condition in which its parts were separated, as 
little more than a nebulous cloud making part of a whole in which we find 
the sun and the other planetary bodies also resolved ; and that if we traced 
back the animal world and the vegetable world we should find, preceding 
what now exists, animals and plants not identical with them, but like them, 
only increasing their differences as we go back in time, and at the same time 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 287 

becoming simpler and simpler, until finally we should arrive at that gelatinous 
mass which, so far as our present knowledge goes, is the common foundation 
of life. 

In examining the three hypotheses the professor insisted that the 
question is simply a question of fact ; historical fact. " The universe 
came into existence somehow, and the question is whether it came 
into existence in one fashion or another." The evidence as to the 
existence of any fact is one of two kinds, which he distinguished as 
" testimonial evidence" and " circumstantial evidence." He pro- 
tested against the acceptance of testimonial evidence, by which he 
stated that he meant " human testimony." Of course no human 
being was present at the beginning, and as there was a beginning, then 
one of three things must be true : first, we must learn how the universe 
began from what the universe presents to the inspection of our own 
senses ; or, secondly, we must depend upon revelation from Him who 
created it in the beginning ; or else, thirdly, we must remain forever 
in total ignorance of the origin of things. Perhaps the universe 
does not contain within itself any thing out of which the logical 
understanding of man can work out an intelligent theory of the 
creation. Who is there to assure us that we are absolutely bound 
down to one class of witnesses ? Suppose the geologist shall tell us 
that we must not listen to the astronomer, or the astronomer that 
we must not listen to the geologist, in taking evidence on this 
question. Who shall decide between these two ? Is it not think- 
able that the universe may have been by a great first intellectual 
omnipotent Cause called into existence and shaped in such a fashion 
as to make it impossible for any finite intellect to read the story of the 
beginning from the runic characters on stone or the illuminated 
missals in the skies ? Who shall bind us to a verdict founded upon 
evidence purely metaphysical, or evidence purely physical, or upon 
both combined? Now, perhaps, science has nothing to do with the 
question of the beginning, as toward the close of his lectures Pro- 
fessor Huxley seemed to feel. If not, then it cannot stand in 
antagonism to even Milton or Ovid, to say nothing of the book of 
Genesis. 

In drawing his distinctions between circumstantial evidence and 
testimonial evidence, as he calls them, Professor Huxley did not 



288 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

seem to anticipate that when he came into his third lecture, and 
brought what he thought was the clinching argument, in what he 
called a demonstration — but which every candid scientific man who 
examines it will, we suspect, think proved an utter failure as a 
demonstration — that that so-called demonstration would rest, for 
that entire audience, totally and wholly upon the testimonial evi- 
dence which he had charged us to discard, Professor Huxley says 
that he saw certain fossils in the hands of Professor Marsh. Now, 
to give any weight at all to his concluding argument, we were com- 
pelled to believe that he stated exactly what he saw. Supposing 
that he told the truth, and we do not insinuate to the contrary, we 
could only believe that he reported what he thought he had seen. 
He, for his part, was compelled to receive the human testimony of 
Professor Marsh, and, from the well-known character of that gentle- 
man, no one blames Professor Huxley for believing him. But who 
else knows these facts ? Further, who knows but that Professor 
Huxley and Professor Marsh may have been played upon — as upon 
scientific men tricks, it is said, have been played before ? If any 
man re-state to us the history of the obtaining of these fossils, all 
we can say is, certainly this rests upon the testimony of Professor 
Marsh. Then, when Professor Huxley is called up, there are 
three things to be taken into consideration. In the first place, 
what did really Professor Huxley see, when he says he saw certain 
fossils ? Did he make no mistake ? Were the six defects in human 
vision, which Helmholtz has shown to exist ordinarily in man, 
absent from the eyes of Professor Huxley when he was at Yale 
College? Then supposing that Professor Huxley delivers accurate 
reports to us of his perceptions, and fairly reports to us his reasoning 
thereupon, the entire argument of his whole series of lectures, so 
far as the audience was concerned, depended wholly upon testi- 
monial evidence. If, then, we obey his injunction in the first 
lecture, that " in dealing with these questions we should be indiffer- 
ent to all a priori considerations," and reject testimonial evidence, 
we must be indifferent to Professor Huxley's lectures, and entirely 
reject the professor's conclusions. Mark, we are not trying him by 
our standard, but by one erected by himself. He has established 
this measure for others ; he must submit to be bound by it himself. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 289 

In general terms, the reception of scientific conditions must rest as 
much upon human testimony as the reception of the Bible. 

If Professor Huxley had remembered that there were in his 
audience scores of people who knew the history of geology it might 
have caused him to hesitate before making a fling at the biblical 
scholars who have rendered different readings of the Hebrew text. 
His sneer at the marvelous flexibility of a language which admits 
of such diverse interpretations brought from the audience the 
laughter and applause which any simple exhibition of stump oratory 
would have elicited. But while they laughed they remembered the 
marvelous flexibility of the rocks, and not a few of them knew that 
they were able to show more various readings rendered by geologists 
of the text of the earth's structure than by scholars of the Hebrew 
text of the first chapter of Genesis. 

But his audience could not anticipate that at the very conclusion 
of his third lecture the professor himself must afford a most remark- 
able example of double-action reversible geological treatment. In 
one part of his lecture his assumption was that the present forms of 
animal life were not simply developed from antecedent forms, but 
that this development was probably evidence of evolution. He 
spoke of the chalk deposits in the bottom of the ocean. Now, 
taking the time of their formation as a starting-point, and reasoning 
therefrom to the time it must have required for the geological 
formations now known to us, and taking what little we have been 
able to learn of development, and reasoning therefrom by Professor 
Huxley's own method to the probable time required for evolution, 
it must have been a vastly longer time than that required for de- 
velopment, and millions of millions of years would be very little 
time. As he was about to take his seat it seemed to occur to him 
that there would be people in his audience of sufficient intelligence 
to know that astronomers and physicists had shown that the con- 
dition of the earth was such that neither horse nor orohippus could 
have existed at the time when his theory demanded animal life on 
earth ; whereupon the professor made an extraordinary somersault, 
by saying that the biologist knows nothing whatever of the amount 
of time which may have been required for the present evolution. 

" I have not the slightest means of guessing whether it took a mill- 
19 



290 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

ion of years, or ten millions of years, or a hundred millions of years, 
or a thousand millions of years to give rise to that series of changes." 
Yes, but Professor Huxley cannot sweep aside all that men have 
settled in science in order to make room for his reveries over a 
fossil or two. His theory demands at least five hundred millions of 
years. He cannot turn upon his friend, Sir William Thompson, 
who shows that life could not have existed upon the earth five 
hundred millions of years ago because the earth would have been 
too hot. To this he replied (we quote Professor Huxley's own 
words), "That is not my affair ; settle that with the geologists, and 
when you settle that between yourselves I will agree with any con- 
clusion. " Well, the coolness of that is quite refreshing. Suppose, 
for instance, it could be shown that the doctrine of evolution stands 
opposed to the facts supposed to be established by the Copernican 
system of astronomy ; will it do for him to turn to the Herschels 
and others, and say, " That is not my affair ; settle with yourselves 
whether the sun goes round the earth, or the earth goes round the 
sun, and I will agree with any conclusion " ? 

It is not the Bible which evolution opposes so much as astronomy 
and geology ; and, for our own part, the last five sentences in his 
third and concluding lecture were, in point of fact, a surrender, 
not probably of the theory of evolution, but certainly of the pro- 
fessor's own argument. 

If our space allowed we do not think we should find it extremely 
difficult to meet each particular point in the professor's lectures. 
He failed utterly to bring forward the slightest logical proof of the 
probability of evolution beyond that which resides in the single 
specimen of development which he undertook to show in regard to 
the horse. Now, supposing every statement of fact which the pro- 
fessor made to be as accurate as we do him the credit of thinking 
that he believes it to be, and suppose that the whole argument has 
the strength which he claims for it, it does not touch the point in 
question at all. The development and improvement of any one 
species, any two species, or any thousands of species, or of all the 
species, does not establish evolution. We must have, not one, but a 
very great many instances, not of development, but of evolution ; 
of one species passing into another species ; many instances of the 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 29 1 

pig tribe passing over into some of the varieties of the ruminants, 
and vice versa ; lizards becoming crocodiles and crocodiles lizards, 
snakes crocodiles, and snakes lizards. We understand the professor 
admits that there is no way of filling " the gaps," as he calls them, 
between these two, and says, " if then it could be shown that this 
state of things was from the beginning, and had always existed, it 
would be fatal to the doctrine of evolution." This is a manifest 
attempt to shift a responsibility. The professor announced that he 
would come from Europe to America to demonstrate the truth of 
evolution, and instead of doing that he challenges some one to 
show that it is false ! 

When the professor comes to establish evolution on a basis as 
solid as the system on which Copernicus has established his hypo- 
thesis we have a right to demand that he should bring us more 
instances than one or two things consistent with the possibility of 
the truth of evolution. He has a plan. He has to make out his 
case. How does he do it ? He comes into court with three wit- 
nesses. One is a solitary bird that has teeth set in grooves and 
another with teeth set in sockets. The second witness is a fossil 
which seems to show an intermediate form between the crocodile 
and bird ; and the third, the apparent genealogy of the horse 
through the pliohippus and protohippus, up to the orohippus ; and 
this is absolutely all ! And Professor Huxley, after this thorough 
break-down of his case, could coolly look an intelligent jury in the 
face and say that the doctrine of evolution at the present time rests 
upon as exact and secure a foundation as the Copernican theory of 
the motions of the heavenly bodies ! Why, if a theologian were to 
announce a new doctrine, and go three thousand miles to prove it, 
and then produce no more evidence of its truth in the constitution 
of man, or in outward nature, or in the Bible, than Professor Huxley, 
with his great abilities and remarkable industry, has been able to 
bring to the doctrine of evolution, he would be laughed to scorn, 
not only by the students of natural sciences, but by the scientific 
students of theology. 

On as firm a basis as the Copernican system? Why, did the 
professor really suppose his hearers so ignorant as not to perceive 
that the admission of what is claimed by the evolutionists demands 



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a re-examination of the Copernican system ? If evolution be true 
the Copernican system itself does not rest on any too solid basis — is 
not nearly as well established as astronomers take it to be. 

We, for our part, are ready at any time to become evolutionists. 
We have no prejudice against the hypothesis. We have no dread 
of its results. We have no religious convictions that would be 
shocked by it. We have no theological notions which would be 
upset by it. We are willing to have Professor Huxley prove the 
hypothesis to us, but we are not willing to admit that we are weak or 
ignorant enough to yield to such argumentation as he gave us in 
Chickering Hall ; and we are very happy to state that we have not 
yet met a single one of his audience who was convinced by the 
professor's dogmatic assumptions and defective dialectics. 

The conundrum which is now being discussed is this : Did 
Americans overestimate the skill of Professor Huxley, or did Pro- 
fessor Huxley under-estimate the intelligence of the average Amer- 
ican ? Perhaps both was the case ; but certainly the doctrine of 
evolution has gained no available ground by the professor's late 
missionary service. 



SPONTANEOUS REGENERATION. 

[It is proper to state that this short article appeared first in Fra?ik Leslie's Sunday Magazine, 
October, 1878. Professor Drummond's work on The Natural Law in the Spiritual Realm ap- 
peared in this country in 1882. The germ of that book is in this article, and had I had time I should 
have endeavored to run it along several lines of thought, as Professor Drummond has. It was 
original with me and not taken from his book, as my article was printed years before his book 
appeared. It was just as original with him undoubtedly. I have no reason to believe that he 
had seen this article when he began his book. A bit of history like this should make men care- 
ful in regard to charges of plagiarism.] 

There are some so-called scientists whose intense hatred of the 
supernatural gives them a disposition to believe in spontaneous 
generation ; that is to say, it would gratify them to know that 
there came living things out of inorganic matter ; that somehow 
that incomprehensible element of life which makes all the difference 
between an addled egg and a good egg, between an egg that has 
been cut out of a stone and an egg that had come out of an animal, 
that that "something" now and then allies itself with inorganic 
matter without the intervention of a Creator. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 293 

The wish is often father to the thought and mother to the state- 
ment. 

All through many modern scientific books there is the most reck- 
less scattering of statements, as if they were facts, which have abso- 
lutely not the slightest shadow of a foundation in any thing known 
to truly scientific men. Apart from all religious prejudices — nay, 
without any pretensions to religion — there are scientific men who 
are ready to rebuke these unscientific pretenders to science. For 
instance, one of the most illustrious scientists now living, it would 
probably be agreed, is Dr. Virchow. The religionists would call 
him a thoroughly irreligious man, but he rebukes the tyranny of 
dogmatism which undertakes to master the whole view of nature 
by the premature generalizing of theoretical combinations. 

The most desirable thing for the materialistic philosophers to be 
able to prove is spontaneous generation. Experiment after experi- 
ment has been tried to show that such a thing really occurred in 
nature ; and once or twice certain experiments were triumphantly 
paraded as conclusive of the truth of that theory. And it really 
seemed as if those experiments had been fairly conducted. But 
those experiments themselves were subjected to tests of extreme 
delicacy and fidelity, and were shown to have been conducted under 
conditions which insured incompleteness. 

No scientist of any respectability now believes in spontaneous 
generation. Professors Tyndall and Huxley tell us that there is 
not a particle of proof of any such thing having* ever occurred. 

The debt of religion to science is already very great. All true 
science is strengthening the foundations of Christianity and illumi- 
nating many of its darkest passages and chambers. The debt of 
Christianity to real science is hereafter to be immense. 

One of the doctrines of Christianity is called regeneration. It is 
announced in the words of the Master, " Ye must be born again." 
It is taught throughout the New Testament Scriptures that there 
must be a new nature in man, as new a nature as when vitality — 
whatever that is — comes to be connected with inorganic matter to 
produce that living, locomotive thing which we call an animal. This 
regeneration is absolutely necessary to spiritual life upon earth and 
everlasting life in heaven. 



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The point in this doctrine which has made it foolishness to all 
Greeks and a stumbling-block to all Jews is that the Scriptures teach 
that there can be no such thing as spontaneous regeneration. Never, 
without the coming in of some element from without, does the hu- 
man soul become regenerated. Never, by any changes occurring in 
itself, by itself, either involuntarily or voluntarily — that is, spontane- 
ously in the highest sense, does a soul become regenerated. No 
soul can say to itself, " I will cultivate myself into goodness ; I will 
change my whole nature ; I will subject myself to all the most refin- 
ing processes known among men ; I will study and practice ethics ; 
I will give to the aesthetic part of my nature the most delicate cult- 
ure by surrounding it with the highest objects of art and indulging 
it in all the pleasures of the most refined taste, and I will sweeten 
my manners by commerce with the gentle and the avoidance of all 
the uncouth." A man may do all that and yet be thoroughly unre- 
generated. 

Goethe, in our own century, has done that perhaps more largely 
than any other man, and under the most favorable circumstances ; 
yet at the Court of Weimar he lived as thoroughly unregenerate a 
soul as any that inhabited the body of the most uncultivated peasant 
in the Black Forest. 

The fact is that there is no such thing as spontaneous regenera- 
tion. It is by the will and power of God that a man is regenerated. 
It is, as the apostle calls it, the regeneration of the Holy Ghost. A 
soul differs from inorganic matter in this : that it is possessed of will. 
It can keep out the spiritual life from itself, or it can admit the 
spiritual life, but it cannot create the spiritual life. It cannot super- 
induce upon itself the spiritual life. That is of God, and must be 
as direct an act of his as when he makes vitality enter into or seize 
upon or clothe itself with some inorganic matter. 

The apostle likens the regeneration of the soul to the creation of 
the world, the light shining into the darkness ; and just as that light - 
shining into the darkness brought cosmos from chaos, so the Spirit 
of God, shining into a human soul, imparts to that soul the spirit- 
ual life. 

The very scientific precision of the term is demonstrated by our 
science. Generation is the word used when life produces organism 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 295 

out of inorganic matter, and regeneration when the Holy Ghost 
produces a new life in a life which already exists. 

Why should men of physical science object to the results of sci- 
ence in another department when every day of our lives the most 
accurate conclusions in biological science are confirming and illus- 
trating the most accurate conclusions in theological science? 



"SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST." 

When certain evolutionists endeavor to bring to the support of 
their hypothesis the other hypothesis of the " survival of the fittest " 
they mean by fittest not the fairest, the loveliest, and the best, but 
"the strongest." They assume, and they may be right, that the 
strongest is the fittest. But fit means the designedly adapted to 
an end. That means a designer. The proof of the proposition that 
" the fittest" survives must always be, so far forth, proof of the ex- 
istence of a God. 

Moreover, why not let Christianity have benefit of the hypothe- 
sis of survival of the fittest ? Whatever Christianity has outlived, 
or lived down, or absorbed, or held in subjection, or surpassed, must 
be given up. If there be any thing stronger than Christianity it 
will override Christianity, however sweet, humane, or divine Chris- 
tianity may be. Up to date — let us not prophesy — it must be ad- 
mitted by the candid, the thoughtful, and the observant that just 
as countries take on Christianity they take on civilization and grow 
in power and material prosperity ; and just as they lose the salt of 
Christianity they hasten to decay. On the other side, also, just 
as people grow in physical and intellectual power they choose 
Christianity. 

Up to date, then, Christianity has the scientific claim to pre- 
eminence. Such gentlemen as Mr. Herbert Spencer need not 
spoil the sweetness of their philosophic tempers by virulent hatred 
of Christianity. If any thing stronger comes along Christianity 
will perish. If it survive it ought to survive ; it has inherent 
right to survival. What is the use of hating any thing which is 



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so weak that it must disappear, or so strong that it must be 
permanent ? 

But the hatred of Christianity seems to be the sentiment which 
sustains Mr. H. Spencer in his philosophical studies, while history 
perpetually announces it the " fittest." It will probably survive. 



DISCOVERIES. 



As new generations of students of the Bible arise new statements 
of old doctrines and new discoveries of truth may be expected. A 
devout thinker, applying to the Bible the knowledge already ac- 
quired in various departments and the increasing scientific skill 
which must come with practice, will discover truths long hidden to 
the human eye. 

The same state of things exists in nature. There was a time 
when the royal heliocentric truth w r as unknown in astronomy, and 
the imperial law of gravitation not dreamed of among men. In 
physical science every century brings out from among crowds of 
conjectures and hypotheses and guesses some real truth which all 
the subsequent investigations of scientific men go to confirm. We 
sometimes wonder how so many centuries could have passed and 
these things have not been discovered. 

Nevertheless the historical fact is patent. When, therefore, any 
student brings forward a doctrine not heretofore held by Christians 
its novelty, while no condemnation, is certainly no objection to it. 
If the Bible be as much a creation of Almighty God as the physical 
universe is we must expect that there are embosomed in it truths 
which not yet have been discovered by man. How stale and flat 
and unprofitable were scientific study if any one or any ten genera- 
tions of men could discover, formulate, and s)'stematize all the 
knowledge of phenomena possible to the mind of man ! Such a 
state of the case would demonstrate clearly one of two things: either 
that the human intellect is incapable of progress, or that universal 
truth lies in a circle so small that its circumference is no larger than 
the limits of a finite mind. Such a supposition would be greatly 
discouraging. Would it not be equally so if the Bible were fixed in 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



297 



all its teachings, if the plummets of our investigation could drop to 
the bottom of all its depths, and one generation of thinkers could 
discover the whole and impart all its possibilities of truth ? And 
yet that is assumed whenever the question is asked : " If this teach- 
ing be true how comes it that theologians have never discovered it 
before?" 

The Bible is that hemisphere of divine truth which is open to the 
eye and the telescope of spiritual observers and thinkers. There 
are in it what appear now to be nebulae, which some more powerful 
instrument of the future ages shall dissolve into systems. New con- 
stellations shall come into view ; and as there comes to be an 
increase of study old errors must drop out, old truths find new ad- 
justments to the truths freshly discovered, and a man may just as 
well hope to form a system of theology in any one age which shall 
be changeless through all coming time as the astronomers of this age 
may hope to construct a map that shall be changeless for all the 
students of the heavens from this time forth, down to the night 
when the last observer among men shall receive, through the tube 
which he has leveled at the sky, the last rays of stellar light that 
shall fall on the organ of human vision. 

Let not, then, a man be set down as a heretic who had discov- 
ered a new truth. Let not people say : " As great, as wise, as able 
men as he have lived in previous ages and have never discovered 
these things, therefore they cannot be true." Let him remember 
that Plato and Moses and the man of Uz were greater men than any 
of the Herschels of our modern day, and yet these Herschels know 
a thousand times as much of physical truth as was revealed to the 
seers of ancient times. 

"When a man brings me a new doctrine I have but one question 
to ask: " Is this contained in and taught by the Bible?" If an 
affirmative answer be returned to this question then the time of the 
discovery is of no consequence. The years will come in which the 
infant of to-day will be counted among the most ancient of man- 
kind. 



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TO THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION. 



There is an awful sound in the words of the second commandment, 
which represents God as visiting " the sins of the fathers upon the 
children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate" 
him. This statement should always be connected with that which 
immediately follows, " and showing mercy unto thousands (of gen- 
erations) of them that love " God and " keep " his " command- 
ments." 

We are to remember that these two statements were written 
together, and that they were published thousands of years ago. 
Were they " mistakes of Moses? " Let us see. 

Of late years much attention has been paid to heredity. An 
immense number of facts have been gathered, and certain apparently 
trustworthy principles have been settled. Among these are (1), 
that physical and intellectual traits are transmissible ; (2) that they 
are modified, strengthened, or weakened by circumstances, or, as 
scientists say, by environment ; and (3) that a vicious heredity, 
such as the alcoholic heredity, finally causes a family to become 
extinct. 

As early as 1781 Erasmus Darwin, in his Botanical Garden, wrote : 
" It is remarkable that all the diseases from drinking spirituous or 
fermented liquors are liable to become hereditary, even to the third 
generation, gradually increasing till the family becomes extinct." 
Mark that phrase, " unto the third generation." 

One hundred years after (1886) Dr. Carothers, of Hartford, in a 
paper on " Inebriety and Heredity," wrote : " In these cases there 
seems to be in certain families a regular cycle of degenerative dis- 
eases. Thus, in one generation great eccentricity, genius, and a 
" high order of emotional development. ... In the next generation, 
inebriate, feeble-minded, or idiot. In the third generation, paupers, 
criminals, tramps, epileptics, idiots, insane, consumptives, and 
inebriates. In the fourth generation they die out, or may swing back 
to great genius, pioneers, and heroes, or leaders of extreme move- 
ments." 

A very great amount of authority could be brought to confirm 
these statements. It is a very natural question how so early an 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 299 

author as the writer of Exodus xx. could know that vicious 
heredity has a tendency to run down three generations and to 
become extinct in the fourth. Such knowledge, thousands of 
years before the possibility of science was ever suspected, is surely 
remarkable. 

Another remarkable thing is that, having been so scientifically 
correct in regard to vicious heredity, the author made no mistake in 
regard to heredity in general by fixing the limit of all heredity at 
the fourth generation. All intervening history from the days of 
Moses to this day confirms the teaching of modern science, that 
good characteristics may be perpetuated indefinitely, and that is 
the meaning of " thousands " of generations. Vicious traits may be 
eliminated. 

If a man with a vicious tendency struggle against it and strive 
to live according to God's commandments, and especially if he 
marry a woman who comes of the seed of the godly, and his off- 
spring pursue the same course, the power of the evil tendency 
will be diminished until, in succeeding generations, it shall be 
destroyed. 

The man who inherits soundness of body and mind from ancestors 
who have bequeathed him also a heritage of holy living may expect 
his line of descendants generally to be rich in good impulses, which 
will never die out so long as they love God and keep his command- 
ments, and intermarry with those that do the same. Nor will that 
family itself become extinct. These transmitted traits secure the 
perpetuation of the family. 

Lessons of tremendous responsibility are taught by this law of 
heredity. No man liveth for himself; he liveth also for his off- 
spring. A voice from far-down ages calls each man and woman to 
purity. No man can guiltlessly neglect the environment of his 
children. If for his personal convenience or comfort or aggrandize- 
ment he exposes his children to a vicious surrounding, they will 
absorb evil influences which will create evil traits, and those traits 
will be transmitted. 

Every man is bound to examine the antecedents of the woman he 
is to make his wife. Every woman is bound to make sure of the 
antecedents of the man who offers himself as her life-mate. Each 



3oo CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

is to calculate the modifying influences of the other on the 
possible offspring of both. 

The Bible and Nature unite in teaching us, from the inevitability 
of heredity, that the power of evil is to power of evil as that of 
" three or four " to " the thousand." Let no man, therefore, do 
himself or his heavenly Father the injustice of dwelling with de- 
spairing emphasis on " visiting the sins of the fathers upon the 
children of the third and fourth generation," but cheer his heart by 
the remembrance that to counteract that bitterness is the sweetness 
of the assurance that the heavenly Father shows " mercy " to any 
number of" thousands" of generations that love him and keep his 
commandments. 




WHAT NEXT ? 



(t> 




III. (s) 



The Family Hearth-Stone 



~>^ 





y^^s&^/^/L^^M^J 



THE FAMILY HEARTH-STONE, 




FOR YOUNG WOMEN 



"WHAT NOW?" 

[In 1850 the author of this volume became president of a College for Young 
Ladies at Greensboro, N. C. In 1853 a class of exceptionally bright students 
came to its final graduation. As a souvenir for the members of the class and as 
embodying the advice he would fain give to all the pupils passing from under his 
instruction, he prepared a little book entitled "What Now f" the question 
which would naturally come to every thoughtful girl upon passing from her 
academic studies into the world and into what is called " society." The young 
ladies in the class for which it was first prepared would all pass into homes of 
comparative ease, where there were servants to do most of the household work. 
In 1864 the little book fell into the hands of an officer of the American Tract 
Society, and he proposed such a revision as would adapt the address to young 
women in narrower circumstances as well as to those of ample means. As re- 
vised it has since been published by the American Tract Society, 1 50 Nassau Street, 
New York, where it can be obtained in single copies or in quantities for distribu- 
tion. It has been found to be a profitable present to young ladies in every 
station of life and girls just quitting schools.] 

It is a remark of that keen analyzer of human character and 
shrewd observer of human manners, John Foster : " I have ob- 
served that most ladies who have had what is considered as an 
education have no idea of an education progressive through life. 
Having attained a certain measure of accomplishment, knowledge, 
manners, etc., they consider themselves as made up, and so take 
their station. They are pictures which, being quite finished, are now 
put in a frame, a gilded one, if possible, and hung up in permanence 



304 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



of beauty — in permanence, that is to say, till old Time, with his rude 
and dirty fingers, soil the charming colors." 

It is to the young ladies who have had "what is considered as an 
education " that the counsels of this little book are addressed, 
whether their training has heretofore been conducted in schools or 
under the guidance of skillful hands at home. In this generation 
and in this country very many young ladies have had the advan- 
tage of a regular course in academies and seminaries some of which 
are so wide in their aims as to take the name of colleges. There are 
very many young ladies who have had careful instruction in the 
domestic circle, and have such good minds that some of them sur- 
pass many who " graduate," as it is called, from the higher schools 
in the country. 

It is hoped that both classes will be interested in the sentiments 
here presented to their consideration. It is quite natural, however, 
that in addressing educated young ladies about to enter upon the 
active duties of life, taking a position which causes them to cease to 
be considered as girls, and ranking them with women, the mind of 
the writer should turn to those who have passed through school- 
life ; but there is no suggestion or advice addressed to them which 
is not believed to be equally profitable to the other class of intelli- 
gent young ladies. 

You have gone through the passage of girlhood. You stand be- 
fore a great door which, not many years ago, seemed to you to be a 
long way in the distance. Look at it now. It bears an inscription. 
That inscription is the question, What NOW ? 

Yes, what now ? Something now, surely. You are not of that 
class of young ladies described by John Foster as having no idea 
that education is progressive through life. If so, what a grand 
mistake you have made ! You have merely begun. The most that 
any, even the best schools in the country, can do for their pupils is 
merely to teach them how to educate themselves. They give them 
the point of departure, the charts, the compass, the instruction in 
navigation, and launch them upon the sea on which they are to 
make the voyage of life toward the port of heaven. They must 
ever be watching the winds, guarding the helm, taking their bear- 
ings, and making their soundings. But alas ! how many young 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



305 



ladies are launched and go a-drifting, helmless and compassless, 
whithersoever wind and wave may bear them. And how many go 
down at sea, or wreck on reefs where many a bark lies shattered ! 

To take up Foster's figure, you have simply chalked on the 
canvas the outlines of the landscape. The painting is to be a life- 
long work. You are carefully to mix your colors, study the shades, 
lay on the pigment, and bring your picture to such perfection that 
it may be framed in immortality and hung in the grand gallery of 
eternity. When a nobleman had engaged an artist to execute a 
masterpiece of sculpture for him he visited the studio after several 
weeks' absence, and it seemed to him that the artist had made little 
progress. " What have you been doing ?" said he. " W T orking at 
this figure." " But I see nothing done beyond what was accom- 
plished before my last visit." "Why," said the sculptor, " I have 
developed this muscle, I have modified this portion of the drapery, 
I have slightly changed this expression of the lip." " But these are 
trifles." " True, my lord," replied the sculptor; " but perfection is 
made up of trifles." 

And so in the development of character. No one can appreciate 
the hidden labor, the fastidious carefulness, with which you will toil 
in secret to strengthen some weak point in your character, to bring 
out some faculty and to educate some power. But the world can 
appreciate the whole of a nobly-developed character. It is in this as 
in other things, as in painting, for instance. The picture charms 
from its vraisemblance, its truth to nature, its soft blending of colors, 
its harmonious adjustment of features. The beholder is delighted. 
The slightest disproportion in a figure, the slightest unbalance of 
light and shade, would break the charm. The beholder could not 
tell why ; but there would be something wrong. How little can 
he who walks a gallery of paintings tell of the toil, the study of 
nature and of the masters, the close devotion to details, the whole 
week spent on a twig, on a leaf, on a square inch of flame or smoke 
or foliage ! 

And so in music. The harmony and the melody are perfect. 
The orchestra is perfectly cast. The composer and manager have 
neglected no detail. The instruments are brought to exactest ac- 
cord. The voices are trained to their best capabilities. The effect 
20 



3o6 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



upon the audience is prodigious. A wrong note, a weak string, a 
single harsh voice would destroy the effect. But who can estimate 
the long years of scientific training upon the part of the composer, 
to enable him to produce a work which accords at once with science 
and the beatings of ten thousand human hearts? Who can appre- 
ciate the care with which each member of the orchestra has brought 
his voice to a perfect consonance with a hundred other voices of 
different powers ? 

And so with oratory. The chains of logic are flung round an 
audience, and the lever of the heart is put into the windlass of the 
intellect, and the whole mass of human spirits is drawn by the 
power of a single hand. But who can tell what fields of science 
and history have been explored, and what hours of careful weigh- 
ing of arguments, what years of the study of language and voice 
and of the balance of human passions, what efforts of self-control 
have marked the history of the orator before he found the capa- 
bility of seizing and lifting and swaying thousands of human souls. 

These results occupy small space. The painting is hung, and in 
one minute its entire effect has entered the mind and enchained it. 
The key-note is struck, and in ten minutes the crowded concert- 
room heaves with emotion. The oration begins, and in one hour 
thousands of hearts have been elevated to the highest region of 
sentiment or hurried to the verge of the greatest moral or physical 
daring. But the preparation has been long and laborious — so long 
and laborious that the producers of effects in these several cases are 
not aware how much they did before they could do any thing very 
great. Every object upon which the painter had gazed, every 
sound of man or bird or instrument to which the composer had 
listened, every thought, fact, argument, or sentiment which had 
entered the mind or heart of the orator, had carried on the educa- 
tion which was necessary to the production of his masterpiece. 

You must not, therefore, ever think that your work is entirely 
done. You must not regard any thing as a trifle which will help 
you to produce the grand effect of life. No moment of time is 
contemptible, no book, no acquaintance, no conversation. They 
all modify, all educate. The seal will make its exact likeness on 
the wax. Every line, how minute soever, will leave its counterpart 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



307 



on the plastic material. You are to stamp your character's image 
upon the world and upon your eternity. Your doom beyond the 
grave will answer to your character as the alio of the wax answers 
to the basso of the seal. 

The result is worth the effort. Whatever may have been the pre- 
vious toil, anxiety, and care of the painter, the musician, and the 
orator, the hour when hundreds and thousands are standing with 
rapt delight before the almost speaking canvas, or palpitating with 
rapture, or melting with emotion under the ravishing strain of the 
music, or surrendering themselves to the magic power of eloquence, 
is a reward to each amply repaying all outlay of time or thought or 
care. The hour of victory is worth the year's toilsome campaign. 
And so will it be with you. Whatever you may do toward educat- 
ing yourself, there will come times of trial in which, if you are pre- 
pared for its emergencies, you will find every power taxed but every 
labor rewarded. There will then be no regrets over privation and 
study and care. 

If now you really feel the truth of the statement that your education 
is not finished, and that you are to work at it as long as you live, you 
may be willing to heed a few suggestions of practical importance. 

You have just quit school, not " finished," as the phrase of the 
ignorant fashionable world has it ; on the contrary, unfinished, very 
much so indeed ; but superior to badly-taught girls in this— that 
you feel how very unfinished you are, while they, pretty simpletons, 
go forth to simper bald sentiment and lisp bad French in circles as 
silly as themselves, to distress their parents, to coquette with their 
lovers, to ruin their husbands, and to be mothers of children who 
shall inherit their own weaknesses and superficiality. They are sur- 
prised at the question, What NOW? "What now? Indeed! I 
thought I had done !" You are not so. You stand not at the gate 
of entrance, but at the portal of departure. You go forth to do 
something, something greatly worth the doing. 

Make a Review. 
First of all, make a review. What have you done? How far are 
you educated ? What portion of your character have you neglected ? 
Wherein are you weakest ? To what extent are you able to bear 



308 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



burdens, to deny self, to go forward alone, to help those upon whom 
you may lean or those who may lean upon you ? Take time to do 
this calmly. You will have the warm and cordial greetings of many 
true friends and the complimentary greetings of many hollow 
fashionable acquaintances. When this shall have passed, go into 
yourself and ask : " What do all these expect of me now ? — my 
parents and brothers and sisters, and the domestics, and my circle 
of relatives, and my pastor, and his neighborhood, and my acquaint- 
ances?" Many will expect nothing. They never think of their 
claims upon you or your claims upon them, or the momentous re- 
sponsibilities of human existence. But some will think, and they 
will observe you, and they will judge your parents, your teachers, 
and yourselves, by the views which they perceive you take of life 
and its complicated relationships. If they discover that you think 
the whole of education lies in the little curriculum of studies em- 
braced in the plan of any seminary now existing they will know at 
once that your mind is too narrow to take in the great circle of 
human duty. 

Remember also, young friend, that up to the time you left school 
your education was making progress under very different influences 
from those which will hereafter attend it. In school every thing 
calculated to interrupt you was excluded. Self-cultivation by direct 
effort was secured. But these efforts were not unaided. Your 
course was marked out for you. You have never had to spend a 
moment's thought upon what text-books should next be studied. 
You had them furnished to your hands. In mastering them you 
had the daily aid of those who had gone carefully and repeatedly 
over those studies, having for themselves had the advantage of ex- 
cellent instruction. And when your teachers reached you they 
brought to your aid all the experience in explaining and enforcing 
which they had gathered from years of labor spent on the culture of 
other pupils. This assistance has been most material. 

There will come another most perceptible difference. In schools 
and seminaries you have had the stimulus ministered by the literary 
society, by the presence of books and constant on-going of study 
all around you. You have been in classes. You have been cheered 
by literary companionship. An emulation has been generated, and 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 309 

when you otherwise would have flagged the energy and persever- 
ance of some room-mate or class-mate has renerved you to your 
labors. You have been traveling in a crowd of gay companions, with 
now and then a halting-time and a season of festive refreshment and 
a girding up again, as at the close and opening of school sessions. 

Now you must go alone. You must select your own books and 
methods of study. You must be your .own teacher. You must 
study without the excitement of knowing that the recitation-hour 
will soon arrive and that your reputation with those whose opin- 
ions you respect may be forfeited by an hour's idleness. You have 
no rivalry in study now. Coolly, and from high principle and a 
feeling of the necessity of so doing, must you give yourself up to 
the work of carrying forward your intellectual and moral training. 
The props fall from around you. If you have the strength you are 
expected to have at the close of your school-days you will stand 
and grow ; if not, you will droop and dwindle and die. 

Very many young ladies regard every school regulation as a re- 
straint necessary only for childhood ; and when they are making an 
estimate of the delightfulness of entering upon womanhood, to all 
the caresses of friends, and flatteries of admirers, and brilliance of 
fetes, they add the casting off of this odious confinement. Well, 
the truth is that you are not to be in precisely the same kind of 
restraint, nor the same amount; but unless you have learned to bear 
the absence from society necessary to intellectual culture so as to 
preserve a measure of it, your mental growth has nearly come to 
an end. If you have dwelt upon your departure from school as 
setting you free from tasks, from early rising, from habits of in- 
vestigation ; if you expect to sleep in the morning as long as sloth 
soothes, and to rise with listlessness, and droop through the day 
with no excitement except the thoughts of the style of dress you 
shall wear to the next party of pleasure, your education has not 
been even respectably begun. 

Future Culture. 

Now you must unite in yourself the double character of teacher 
and pupil. The reputation you have won at school has been 
simply as a learner. You are henceforth to achieve a double reputa- 



310 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

tion. You are to teach yourself. You will occasionally review 
your old studies, for they are the roots of all the growth in the 
wide and flourishing forest of science and literature. But you must 
push your studies beyond, and you must keep up with advancing 
science and literature. " Reading makes a full man," says Lord 
Bacon. You must read. You will read. The habits already 
formed will lead you to this. The danger is that you may read the 
wrong kind of books, or read the right kind improperly. Upon 
these points a few suggestions are affectionately addressed to your 
understanding. 

1. Be content not to read everything. You cannot go over the 
whole field. Make a selection. Not because it is a book has a 
volume claims upon you. You would not allow every kind of man 
to talk to you for hours. Be as choice of books ; for books are 
men's minds made portable. As there are so many good books in 
each department of learning, and whereas your time is short, select 
the very best. 

2. Be sure that you never read a sentence in a book which you 
would not be pleased to have your father or your brother know to 
be engaging your attention. Never read a book which you must 
peruse in secret. 

3. Beware of new books. Let them take their place in society 
before you admit them to your library. They will do you as much 
good five years hence as now, and then those assayers of books, the 
critics, will have passed them through the fire, and the great public 
of reading persons, often forming a safer tribunal for the trial of 
books than even the critics, will have stamped the mark of an ap- 
proximated true valuation. There are enough books which have 
survived three generations to engage your attention while the 
books published this year will be running the gauntlet. 

4. Beware of books with colored paper covers, the cheap thin 
issues of a depraved press, the anonymous novellettes and tales 
and stories. Better never read than peruse such trash as these con- 
tain. Be sure that the man who wrote the book you are reading is 
really a great man in his department. Do not be ashamed of being 
ignorant of the productions of the modern, flippant, bizarre writ- 
ers, while you are unfamiliar with Milton and Shakespeare, Spenser 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 3U 

and Ben Jonson, the men that "built the lofty rhyme," and the 
grand old fathers of our noble English tongue. If you read the 
modern books of such men as Macaulay, and Hazlitt, and Leigh 
Hunt, read with them the older and the greater men to whom they 
make constant reference, and from whose " well of English unde- 
fined " they draw the water sparkling in their shallower channels. 

5. Make yourself a small good library to begin on. Let it em- 
brace the works of a very few of the greatest poets, the greatest 
historians, the greatest essayists, the greatest metaphysicians, and 
the greatest religious writers in the language. Of course THE Bible 
will lie at the foundation of your studies. These, with a very few 
books in each of those departments of physical science with which 
a woman should be acquainted, and the best dictionary of the 
language, and, if practicable, an encyclopedia, will make you such 
a beginning as will give strength and breadth and consistency to 
your self-culture. If you have been studying other languages let 
the same rigid rule be applied to the literature of those languages. 
The careful reading of one book will show you what you further 
need in that department, and so you will pass over the field of 
English literature ; omitting much, but, short as life is, and many as 
may be your cares, you will doubtless by perseverance obtain all 
that is necessary. 

6. You will also have your periodicals. Few things produce 
superficiality more than a promiscuous reading of our current 
periodicals. You will have two selections to make — one from the 
mass of such publications soliciting your attention, and another — ■ 
from those which you take — the articles proper to be read. It is 
one of the necessities of successful editing of our monthly maga- 
zines that so much useless matter must be introduced to make them 
popular enough to render them profitable to their proprietors. 
There is no monthly magazine in existence, with which I am ac- 
quainted, which should be read in all its articles by an intellectual 
young lady seeking a high and large cultivation of mind. Your 
own judgment must guide you in this. A very few of the best 
monthlies and quarterlies should be suffered to enter our families, 
and from these a young lady of refinement may select, perhaps, all 
the light reading necessary to mental recreation. It is painful to 



312 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



observe how low the standard of mind among our ladies is, judging 
from the contents of the most popular magazines for ladies. In 
your measure do what you can to correct this evil by laboring to 
enlarge in your sex the class of more elevated readers. 

The material being gathered, how to build is another very grave 
question, upon which the limits we now assign ourselves will allow 
only a few suggestions. 

1. Read slowly. If physical dyspepsia is caused as much by 
rapid eating as by a multifarious diet, so may an intellectual dys- 
pepsia be superinduced by bolting your mental food. The books 
you read are the pabulum of your mind. You eat to live, not live 
to eat ; so you must read to live, not live to read. It is not the 
amount read which will furnish your mind, but the quality and 
mode of reading. No reading will profit which is not mixed with 
thought, and you cannot think of that which is rapidly passing 
before your eyes. 

2. Therefore read thoughtfully. Stop your author and catechize 
him. See if his testimony be reliable. Compare him with himself, 
Let him not speak and run from you. Seize him and hold him 
until you have gathered from him all that he has to give. You will 
wish to make use of your reading. To that end it must be re- 
membered. Memory depends upon attention. Attention requires 
time and thought. It is said of Edmund Burke that he had a 
great memory of what he read. Some one has recorded of him 
that he read every book as though it were the only copy in ex- 
istence, as though he were allowed only one reading of its pages, 
and as though each sentence contained what was to be of daily, and 
everlasting, and immense importance to him. No wonder that he 
garnered his learning so well. I have observed among the pupils 
of our schools two classes of memory. There are those whose 
minds seem like pasteboard spread with fluid gum, to which all 
gnats, all down, all atoms drifting in the atmosphere adhere. They 
are as easily rubbed off by any rough hand. I have seen others 
laboring long with apparently little advancement. But they were 
planting thoughts like trees, which, the longer they remained in the 
soil of the mind, although that soil might be coarse and rocky, 
were striking their roots deeper, and spreading their branches, and 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 313 

making themselves ready to produce annual fruits. So let it be 
with your reading. The memory of words may not be so im- 
portant, but if the thought be great, and the sentiment be just, it 
should be incorporated with your mental constitution, not laid on 
like a robe for a temporary display on a certain occasion, to be 
thereafter flung off and forgotten, but taken into the very heart of 
your intellect and passed into the circulation of your mind's blood. 

3. Read topically. When you strike a rich vein run it through 
your whole library. You will thus be able to bring to your mind 
all the best that has been said upon a given subject by a variety 
of minds. You will often find it well, for instance, when studying 
a certain portion of history, to examine and compare the biographies 
of the principal actors in that particular age, and then see them 
grouped by a few master hands. Occasionally our poets and other 
word-painters give you aid by their analysis of character, and fix 
correct views of character by striking imagery and well-wrought 
story. 

4. Read for use, and use what you read. There is such a thing 
as intellectual wine. You may perpetually be stimulating your 
mind with intoxicating reading. The reaction must be mental de- 
pression, and the longer the stimulus be kept on, and the longer 
the return to a natural healthful state be postponed, the deeper 
will be the depression and the more weakened will be the intellect 
when it wakes up from this unhealthful dreaming. There are 
those who are thus driven again and again to the stimulant until a 
mental delirium tremens sets in on them or they are reduced to a 
driveling idiocy. Beware of this kind of reading. Read for 
strength, for growth, for use. Review your mental states while 
reading. Ask yourself again and again, How am I to use this? 
What does this illustrate or prove? How am I to connect this 
with what I already know ? Where shall I place it in my mind to 
be ready to draw upon at the needful time ? Napoleon said he had 
his mind arranged like a bureau with drawers, so that he could open 
one and study what it contained, shut it up and read another 
without mingling the contents. How different this from many 
minds which seem to find their best representation in a lumber- 
garret or old curiosity-shop! 



3I4 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

In all your reading, dear young friend, ask yourself, How shall I 
answer for this at the judgment-seat of Christ? To him you must 
give an account. The precious hours spent over tawdry stories if 
given to devout reading and study would fit you for greater useful- 
ness upon earth and aid your preparation for heaven. 

Your Field. 

The question, "What now ? " recurs. Why have you spent years 
away from home, after having spent years at home, in the study of 
books of human learning? Why this costly labor, this large outlay 
of money, strength, and time? Have you ever asked yourself this 
question seriously? Is all this rearing of schools and colleges, these 
collections of accomplished teachers, this expenditure of time and 
intellect merely for a show, for a variety in the phases of life ? Is 
there nothing substantial to come as the result of it? What now? 
You leave school. Is all done ? Verily, it were sad to think that 
all the difference between educated and uneducated young ladies 
should be in the fact that the former can utter a few phrases in for- 
eign idioms, thrum a few tunes on a musical instrument, or paint a 
few square feet of canvas. If this be all the difference education 
is a hoax, and the time spent on it wasted. 

But you know that there is a high and great difference. You are 
to go forth to great usefulness, to do much good, to do much more 
than the uneducated. If you do not exert a more powerful and 
healthful influence upon society than those who have not had your 
advantages you will do the great mischief of bringing contempt upon 
education, especially upon the education of your sex. The men 
around you will be confirmed in that low prejudice that it is useless 
to labor for the high cultivation of female intellect, and thus you 
will lower your sex in the estimation of the world and paralyze 
efforts which, if successful, will give the advantages of wholesome 
learning to many young ladies who will make proper use of it. 
Remember, then, that the interests of your sex are, in a large meas- 
ure, in your hands. 

Young men, as they close their collegiate career, begin to calculate 
upon the professions they shall enter. Young ladies cannot do pre- 
cisely as they, and therefore often think they have nothing to do. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 315 

They go home and wait to be married. They marry just because 
it is usual for young ladies to marry, and that is as far as they look ; 
as far as they care. What a mistake ! Every woman should feel 
that her profession is to do good, in beautiful ways becoming her 
womanly nature. If you, my friend, have proper views of your 
place in society and your responsibility to God, you will go forth to 
use all your present knowledge to bless those around you, and go 
forth gathering that you may scatter again. 

Is your field of usefulness small? You will allow one whose 
respect for you imparts the disposition rather to lead you in the 
path of duty than through amusing speculations or fanciful scenes, 
to survey with you the field upon which you must now enter, and if 
possible point out methods in which you can fulfill your engage- 
ments to society and to God. 

Home Duties. 

The first who have claims upon you are your parents. Under 
God they gave you being. When you were utterly helpless they 
sustained you. They have provided for you all the helps you have 
had in the cultivation of your intellect. They submitted to the 
pain of being separated from you through those years when you 
would have been very interesting to them. Almost immediately 
after the troublesome period of infancy and childhood, just as you 
were beginning to be self-reliant, as your mind had expanded suf- 
ficiently to make you a companion for them, they endured the pain 
of parting, solely for your good. They knew also that all the 
months of your society they lost were hurrying you on to that period 
when other love would take the precedence of theirs ; that love which 
draws young ladies from the home-nest to other shelter and other 
society. Yet, with a parent's unselfish love, they gave you up for 
your own benefit. Now, then, when you return to them, until the 
time shall come when he shall appear who is to abstract you 
from parental embraces to try with him life's ruder labors and more 
rugged paths, let every day be filled with the gentlest, sweetest, most 
daughterly attentions to your father and mother. 

Father and mother! Perhaps there is only one now; the other 
may have gone. Your father sits in a lonely house. The friend 



3i6 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



of his youth, who in early days entered with him into love's yoke- 
fellowship, your mother, has gone away from his side to return no 
more. With what solicitous expectancy has he been endeavoring 
to hurry the slow hours of his desolateness to the time when your 
return to the homestead shall gladden his heart by a thousand little 
winning attentions, reminding him of your mother's first devotion ! 
To take that mother's place is no small honor and no small labor. 

Or, it may be that your mother lives — lives to feel how bereft a 
widow is when her stay has been struck from beneath her ; and it 
may be she has denied herself many a comfort and studied a tighter 
economy to purchase for you the intellectual furniture wherewith 
your life is to be adorned. How many a close calculation of means 
may she have made, how many a night lain down with an aching 
head because she could not see how she was to provide from her 
scanty income for all the mouths at home and have sufficient sur- 
plus to keep you amid all the advantages of a high seminary of 
learning ! And since your father died, and upon her has devolved 
the work of looking after many a thing which does not usually fall 
to woman's sphere, it may be that she feels how much of practical 
training was omitted in her education, and seen at length the folly 
of having wasted so many of her school-hours. This may be the 
secret of many a passage in her letters which you thought rather 
gratuitous and as reflecting upon your habits of industry. Lay 
them to heart. Go home to help and cheer her. Let the harvest of 
her tears come quickly and richly in your abundant cheerfulness in 
doing any thing a daughter ought to do for a widowed mother ; 
watch and anticipate her wants and desires, add no feather's weight 
to her burdens, but be hands and feet and wings to your mother. 

Both parents may be living, living in abundance, well-educated 
themselves, moving in a high social circle, to which you are to be 
admitted and where you are to sustain the reputation of the family. 
In that circle you may do much good if to a trained mind you have 
added the traces of a genuine, hearty piety. Carry thither the wis- 
dom which cometh down from above, and the Lord will make you 
fruitful in all good works. 

Your parents may not have had your advantages. In good cir- 
cumstances, having obtained a fortune which has placed them in 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 317 

positions to make them feel the need of an education, they early 
determined that you should never endure all the mortifications 
to which their want of culture has subjected them; and for this 
reason they have freely spent their means to educate you. Or, 
having natural talents, and lacking both the full purse and the 
accomplishments of education, they have practiced a joint econ- 
omy and invested the whole of their annual savings in your 
education. 

They expect you to return to them to be the light of the little 
home-circle and adorn their latter days, and by your superior educa- 
tion to be able to make such social alliances as shall advance you. 
Are they to be disappointed? Nay, verily. Lay not up for your- 
self hours of remorseful self-reproach, when you shall have blasted 
their hopes and hastened their departure from you. If at any time 
you perceive the superiority which your training and associations 
have given you, as you value the respect of the good, as you place 
any estimate upon the invaluable treasure of a permanent self- 
respect, never for a moment, by deed or word or look, betray a dis- 
dainful sense of their inferiority. When you take the hard hand of 
that kind father in yours remember that the fruits of the toil which 
hardened those hands were not expended upon his own pleasures, 
but upon your education ; and remember that while you were shel- 
tered and quiet, turning your books, dancing your snowy hands 
over the keys or strings of musical instruments, that mother was 
in employments that browned her complexion but robed her daugh- 
ter in the dresses which fitted her to mingle with the refined. If 
there be of unholy pride a more disgusting exhibition than any 
other it is the disdain with which some girls who have received a 
little smattering of school-learning affect to look down upon their 
plain mothers. My young friend, be not so. The truly refined and 
well-bred will despise you if they see such exhibitions in you ; and 
you can never by such pride lift yourself from being still that 
mother's daughter. I have no kind of respect for the pretension to 
education which some young ladies make who are willing to sit in 
parlor and drawing-room working beautiful embroidery, thrumming 
the piano, or sighing over novels, while their mothers are in the 
nursery, the laundry, or the kitchen, toiling amid domestic work 



3 i8 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

which must be done if the family be comfortable. Heaven have 
mercy upon the wretched man who, for his sins, may be made the 
husband of such a heartless young person ! If I were advising a 
young gentleman in search of a wife I should carefully direct him 
to ascertain how the young lady treats her parents, especially her 
mother. A young lady who, not habitually, but once a month or 
once a year — I had almost written once in her whole life — ventures 
to speak unkindly, impertinently, or unfeelingly to her mother will 
almost certainly plant her husband's pillow with thorns. In all my 
observations in families I have carefully noticed this, and never 
yet have seen a girl tenderly solicitous of her mother and attentive 
to her wishes and desires who did not make a wife to be honored 
and loved ; and I never knew an unfilial girl that did not become a 
heartless wife and an unhappy mother, if God called her to those 
positions. 

It may be that you have had no aid from your parents. Rich or 
poor, they have never felt the duty of educating you. But, smitten 
with the love of learning, you have had the enterprise to adopt and 
prosecute your own plans, and now you go back to them. If prop- 
erly trained, how radiant will be your mind in that untutored house- 
hold ! You will not seek to overwhelm your parents with the terms 
of art and science which you have acquired. No ; such pedantry 
would di'sfigure your intercourse with them and create stronger 
prejudices against education. Your well-trained faculties will carry 
you with such graceful ease round the whole circle of filial duty 
that they will be as conscious as you are unconscious of the new 
strength which has fallen upon you. In any case, you are to return 
to your parents wiser, better, stronger than you came away. And 
if you have neither father nor mother, strive to fill their places in 
society and shed a pure light of honor on the memory of the 

departed. 

Brothers and Sisters. 

What NOW? That is the importunate question of your heart. 
And perhaps at home there are several young hearts beating with 
the same anxious question. The younger brothers and sisters are 
looking for your return with no small amount of solicitude. " Will 
sister be changed any ? " " I wonder if she will talk as she used to 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



319 



do?" " She has been with so many fine young ladies I'm afraid 
I shall not know how to behave when she comes." " But won't she 
tell us a sight of things ! " These and a hundred similar questions 
and exclamations are made, in the nursery and on the play-ground, 
by the little folks at home. And in their dreams they have pict- 
ured you and made you majestic as a queen and lovely as an angel. 
Go home and show them that you are neither; but, what for them 
is far better than queen or angel, you are a wiser, more considerate, 
kinder, and more affectionate sister. Lead them. Set them all 
examples of filial devotion. Teach them truth and honor, patience 
and courage, meekness and strength, by a varied but consistent 
example. Sympathize with them. Gather up the floating feelers 
of their young spirits and bind them to your heart. Make them 
respect your judgment by your wise assistance in all their pleasures 
and studies, and make them feel that in you they have a friend whom 
they may always approach, even when reverence may deter them 
from entering the presence of their parents. And thus, as they 
grow older, you will exert an influence upon them which shall 
go on widening with the channels of their several influences, and 
descending in blessings upon their children and their children's 
children. 

There is one means by which you can be very useful to your 
younger brothers and sisters. If you are as thoughtful as you 
should be you make many reviews of the several stages of your 
education. You perceive wherein you have been neglected, or what 
you have passed over too superficially. You can prevent or correct 
these things in the younger children. You can give them the right 
" start " in their studies, and direct them until they shall have formed 
proper habits. The most important class in an institution of learn- 
ing is, perhaps, the youngest. The mode is so much more important 
than the subject of study ! A young person who has learned how to 
study may, with comparative ease, acquire all necessary learning. 
The drudgery of the schools is occasioned by a neglect of the first 
instructors to teach their pupils how to form proper habits. All 
this drudgery you may prevent, so far as your brothers and sisters 
are concerned ; and by so doing you will be a life-long blessing to 
them ; you will avert solicitudes and anxieties, feverish tears, and 



3 20 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

discouraging despondency, by teaching a child, not his lesson, but 
how to acquire that lesson. Your education will certainly be con- 
sidered worthless if you cannot assume the office of teacher to the 
younger children. If you do your duty the expense of their educa- 
tion will be lessened, the time they spend from home will be short- 
ened, and their stay at high-schools and colleges be made so much 
more pleasant. There is such a sweet and hallowed power in a sis- 
ter's love that you will lose much of the happiness of your exist- 
ence upon earth if you fail to exert it. 

The Family Servants. 

There is another sphere of usefulness which lies very near all our 
educated young ladies, and which lies too much neglected. I allude 
to the domestics in families. You have certainly grown up with very 
false views if you have learned to look upon servants as another and 
an inferior race of beings. They are human and immortal. They 
are your fellow-sinners. Ranks and orders in society are necessary 
for our well-being upon earth, and no man should seek to level all 
to the same position. God has instituted service, and in its place 
it is honorable. And remember that your Maker is at such an 
infinite elevation above all classes of society that the distance 
between the most menial servant and his God seems no greater than 
that between an earthly monarch and his eternal King, even as we 
do not think of a mountain-top on our earth as being nearer to a 
fixed star than the bottom of the lowest valley. While it is quite 
proper that you should be mistress and another woman should be 
servant while you are both together upon earth, remember that you 
will both soon stand before the throne of God, where the only dis- 
tinctions will lie in the larger or smaller development of the prin- 
ciples of holiness. These thoughts should have an influence to lead 
you to be kind and gentle with the servants about your father's 
house, and to carry the same benignity with you when you assume 
the place of mistress in your own house if God design this for 
you. 

You must give an account for the kind of influence you exert 
upon the servants when you return home. Some of them may be 
old. Perhaps some of them nursed you in your infancy, and per- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 32 1 

haps, as is sometimes the case in established families, both in England 
and America, some of them nursed your father or your mother. 
They will regard you with much tenderness. In any case, going 
from school with all the accomplishments which the unlearned serv- 
ants will imagine you possess, whether you do or not, you will be 
able to exert great influence over them. Now, how will you answer 
to the Father of your spirit if you spend week after week and 
month after month in the pursuit of fashionable pleasure, or even 
in the selfish cultivation of your intellect, and never spend one hour 
in teaching them the way to God while they have been so near you 
and your influence over them is so great for good or evil ? Put it 
to your own conscience. If you let them see in you, in private as 
well as in public, that the ruling power in your heart is not vanity 
or pride or worldly-mindedness, but the love of Jesus and of doing 
good to all for his sake, you will be educating them for a proper dis- 
charge of duty in this life and for the life to come, even if you never 
attempt to give them a sentence of oral instruction in the things 
pertaining to godliness. But if, while a holy and lofty life shall be 
establishing a powerful sway over them, you take proper occasions 
to cultivate their hearts by a regular, devoted attention to them on 
set and proper occasions, you will be preparing stars for your crown 
in heaven. 

Reflect also upon the facts that the happiness or misery of any 
family depends in a large measure upon the character of the serv- 
ants, and that one good or bad servant has great effect upon the 
character of the others. And extend this observation to the fact 
that one happy family in a village or town or country neighborhood, 
both by its example and by the natural contagion of pleasurable 
emotions, sheds a delightful social charm all around it. Now, then, 
if you can gain a right influence over the servants in your father's 
house, so as to educate them in any measure to act by impulses of 
right principles, you will do them good, you will relieve the weight 
that lies upon your mother, you will destroy many discomforts which 
disturb your father, you will lubricate the joints of the domestic 
frame-work, you will add another to the number of the happy fam- 
ilies, and thus make yourself delightfully felt, perhaps, to the remotest 

verge of society and to the last generation of men. 
21 



322 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



Your Neighbors. 

The family circle is, certainly, woman's most appropriate theater. 
There she is to work, there to shine. She is cut off from the fields 
upon which men of ability and ambition distinguish themselves. 
She seldom appears on the forum, never in the battle-rage. There 
can be no female Napoleon, no female Daniel Webster. But woman 
is human. She has ambition as certainly and as powerfully as man, 
and when that ambition is unsanctified she will seek her trophies in 
the triumphs of the ball-room and exercise her diplomacy in the 
finesse of coquetry. But, alas ! how unsatisfactory are the results. 
The more and the greater the triumphs the more is she laying up 
for herself stores of remorse and grief. If she venture upon liter- 
ature, and even attempt science in the way of authorship, she is 
made to feel the prejudice which prevails in society against writing- 
women. Men may admire Madame de Stael and Mary Somerville, 
but whatever tribute their abilities and learning may wring from the 
head is usually given with a corresponding diminution of the more 
precious and spontaneous tribute of the heart. You must have 
learned already that an ounce of love is worth a ton of admiration. 

But when the intellect of woman is sanctified, and her labors lie 
in the direct path of philanthropy, all men feel that they are appro- 
priate to the gentleness and loveliness and unselfishness of her sex. 
In her own family is her nearest and best field ; and while circum- 
stances may occasionally give her opportunities of extending her 
labors beyond, they are always expected to be another development 
of this domestic culture. A young lady may begin her work at once 
and at home by making that home more beautiful in the eyes of all 
its inmates by a thousand little nameless acts of kindness and good 
manners. And how finely have Christian manners been called the 
minor morals ! So much of morals is there in a proper style of man- 
ners that for usefulness, great and permanent usefulness, a lady may 
almost as well be destitute of integrity as of courtesy, and winning, 
sweet, womanly tact and address. I would have you cultivate these, 
not for display, but as widening your real influence for good and as 
being one of the most effectual methods of making your home happy 
to yourself and happy to those whom you are most bound to love. 

When this is done, when by good husbanding of time you shall 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 323 

have found space for the discharge of all your private duties, and 
with your mother and sisters taken your share of the most unpleas- 
ant as well as the most pleasant portions of domestic service — which 
in every household, no matter how many servants there may be, will 
fall upon the ladies of the house — you may still find some time to 
devote to your neighbors, and by kind offices bind your family to 
the families in your immediate vicinity. 

Teaching. 

It is the remark of one of the greatest women of this age, Mary 
Lyon, that " teaching is really the business of almost every useful 
woman." Look through society and see if this be not true. Now, 
it does seem to me that no young lady can be properly educated 
who has not always pursued her studies with a view to teaching in 
some position. She may not look to employment in our seminaries, 
but she will have teaching in some of its modes always before her. 
A young lady who leaves school only to be a woman and be mar- 
ried, having no plans of usefulness in her mind, is not worth a hus- 
band, unless, indeed, she should find her mate in the young man who 
has passed through college simply for the purpose of graduating; 
and such a couple would be a disgrace to their generation. You 
must aim at usefulness. 

Upon quitting school conscience asks, What now ? and your Maker 
and your race propound this question solemnly to your soul. Let 
your answer be, to do something for my Lord. Determine to do 
something. One of the best methods of making larger acquisitions 
is to use your present acquirements promptly, cheerfully, and con- 
tinually. You must be willing to be useful in the first field that 
offers. Dr. Johnson has said that the man who waits until he can 
find some opportunity of being useful on a magnificent scale will 
be of little service to society. Enter the first opening, and as 
you prove yourself faithful in that which is least your Lord will, 
by and by, make a way for you to be faithful in that which is 
greatest. 

If determined to be useful almost the first suggestion to your 
own mind will be to teach. If there be no younger brother or sister 
to be instructed there are some poor children in your neighborhood 



324 



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who have no means of being educated. Could you do better than 
to gather them together and devote an hour or two every day to 
their instruction? The most certain way to become exact in any 
department is to teach. It will be one of the most profitable of all 
your pursuits. The very fact of its being a gratuity will place you 
upon the bare platform of principle, as you will teach for the simple 
object of doing good. You will thus be taking up the ground which 
paid teachers can never cultivate. In the group of ragged children 
in your village may be a few minds of superior natural abilities. 
But no man cares for their souls. They are " pregnant with celestial 
fire." It may be theirs to " sway the rod of empire," or " wake to 
ecstasy the living lyre," if some intelligent and kind spirit will seize 
the direction of their earliest studies. Would it not be a great and 
a good work to gather a few of those intellects around you, and by 
the sweet persuasives which your sex knows so well how to use bind 
them to your love and kindle in them a hungering and thirsting after 
righteousness and truth? You might have them only a few months 
or even a few weeks, but you might in that time place the key of 
knowledge in the hands of some strong and inquisitive intellect which 
will bring out treasures for the enriching of its generation. You 
may plant a single good principle which in moments of powerful 
temptation, when the fate of thousands may hang upon the decision 
of that single individual, may enable him to dare do right, and thus 
send a wide-spread blessing to ten thousand homes. 

If you should ever undertake a work like this you will meet with 
many discouragements from your own want of self-control and of 
intellectual and spirit preparation for this work ; and you will be 
discouraged by the obstinacy, the carelessness, the want of interest 
in your pupils. This will be the more unpleasant to you as you 
will think that, when you give your time and strength without fee 
or reward, the least your pupils can do is to attend and to labor as 
closely as you do. But remember that they have nothing like the 
view of the importance of an education which leads you to engage 
in this work. Keep your heart up. The husbandman has patience 
and waits for the early and the latter rain. When you shall be 
sleeping in the last bed of mortals the rude, hard, apparently in- 
tractable boy whom you drew from the crowd of ragged and 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



325 



soiled urchins may have his spirit kindled by the fires from heaven. 
The spark you dropped on the day when you were, perhaps, most 
discouraged in regard to his case, and when you went to give him 
your last lesson and admonition, may be fanned by the Spirit of 
God until his kindled soul shall be flaming in spiritual power and 
glory amid the institutions of Christ's Church. 

It seems to me that to a Christian teacher few things could be 
more gratifying than to know that those of his pupils whose cir- 
cumstances lifted them above the necessities of laboring for a sup- 
port were employing themselves in teaching those to whom no 
other hands would unfold the book of knowledge. It would be so 
in accordance with that climax in the Lord's description of the 
bringing in of his own dispensation of power and mercy and 
glory — " and to the poor the Gospel is preached." 

Not a Christian. 

I speak to you as to a Christian. If you are not, if you have 
never had the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the 
Holy Ghost, then the first great business of life has up to this time 
been neglected and must take precedence of every thing else. 
Whatever other employment may engage your faculties, however 
important in itself considered, it is an intruder upon more im- 
portant things. It is most melancholy to reflect that you have 
passed through the whole of your education an impenitent sinner, 
under the condemnation of God, without peace of conscience and 
the repose of faith so essential to the highest success. 

It is important that educated minds should be accompanied by 
piety. Piety gives to education its most graceful beauty, and edu- 
cation increases the influence of piety. In your case whatever in- 
fluence you have had at school has been given directly against Jesus. 
You have been so far from doing any thing for your Lord that you 
have actually been standing in the way of the advancement of 
others. The more accomplished you have become, the more fasci- 
nating have been your manners, the larger the injury you have 
wrought. 

Here, then, are several considerations to lead you to seek im- 
mediately after a change of heart ; a genuine, spiritual conversion. 



326 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

1. You have been doing an injury to the cause of Christ through 
all your course at school, and your faculties ought, if possible, to be 
doubly consecrated to God, that, as far as possible, you may coun- 
teract in society the evil you have already done. 

2. Through all your school-course you have been hardening your 
heart and postponing the hour of your return to God. You have, 
therefore, been cultivating a habit which will probably at last over- 
power you unless suddenly broken by God's power. You have said 
that you could not be pious at school because of the many studies 
which engaged you, and because of your youth, and because you 
could not endure the ridicule of your companions. You have 
given temporary quiet to your conscience by promising that im- 
mediately upon leaving school you would give your heart to God. 
That time has arrived. Do you feel more like being pious than you 
did a year or two ago ? No, not so much. Allow me, my dear 
young friend, to deal faithfully with you, and show you what will be 
your probable future course, judging by your past. You will say 
that you cannot commence the great work of salvation now because 
you are in the midst of the greeting of friends, and that such cir- 
cumstances are surely not favorable to religion. You will conclude 
to postpone the work until you shall have passed through these 
festivities. But, my friend, when will they close ? When will 
you cease, to accept invitations and to reciprocate by having 
parties of pleasure at your father's house ? When will you cease 
to travel, and settle into a domestic routine? In this interval your 
accomplishments will probably be bringing suitors around you, 
and your vanity will be kept in a feverish state, and perhaps one 
may begin to excite in you a more and more tender interest, and 
you will not think of the Creator's claims while the love of the 
creature will be so active at your heart ; and then will come the en- 
grossing preliminaries of marriage and all the higher festivities of 
that occasion, and then the gradually increasing cares of domestic 
life ; and so you will go on with your procrastination until you shall 
have settled into a hard, cold, Christless woman of the world, ex- 
erting a most injurious influence over your husband and children. 
O, this were a result very greatly to be dreaded ! But to it you 
will almost certainly come at last, Unless, by great decision of char- 



FOR E VER Y FIRESIDE. 327 

acter, you resolve to put off this work no moment longer. And 
may the Spirit of all grace help you so to do! 

3. Another reason why you should seek these great spiritual 
changes is that there can be no great usefulness without true piety. 
Unrenewed men may often seem to be actuated by sentiments of 
philanthropy, and do those things which will be beneficial to their 
race ; but to enter upon and prosecute a life-long course of useful- 
ness requires the steady aid of a consistent piety. All your plans 
will probably fail unless you be sustained by motives higher than 
any which can be drawn from earth. To do and to suffer for 
Christ's sake sanctifies every pursuit and every pang. Before all 
things, and above all things, my young friend, let me beseech you 
to seek the kingdom of God and its righteousness. 

A Christian Student. 

But perhaps through your whole stay at school you have been 
endeavoring to cultivate that simple yet powerful piety which 
springs from faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. If so, you will at once 
begin to reap the benefits of habits so early formed. You will have 
the comfort of feeling that if you should be taken early from the 
world you have left an impression which may endure for centuries : 
and that that influence will both pass out into the great world with 
your younger school-mates and will also descend upon successive 
generations of scholars. This is the nature of school influence. 

But in addition to this you have the whole power of habit to 
co-operate with you in your efforts in spiritual self-improvement 
and in doing good to the bodies and souls of others. This is a most 
comfortable fact in your case, the full value of which you could not 
properly appreciate unless you could feel this power suddenly with- 
drawn from you and flung, with all its magnitude, as a direct ob- 
stacle in your way. Be grateful to God for all the influences which 
his providence has brought to bear upon you in your spiritual 
growth, and be humbled at the remembrance of the too small im- 
provement made. 

But what now ? You surely have not supposed the cultivation of 
piety to be on a footing with the economic regulations of the 
school, and to be abandoned with those regulations. You are to 



328 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

go forward. You are to become more and more devoted to the 
service of God, more and more self-sacrificing, more and more use- 
ful. Make a review of your religious life while you were at school, 
and see wherein it is defective according to the gospel standard, 
and set yourself to work, by the aids of God's Spirit, to make the 
necessary amendment, resolving to guard against those temptations 
which heretofore have proved too strong for your weak faith. 

Without Social Ties. 

Thus far what is written addresses itself mainly to those who 
have some domestic ties and social position. But, in America 
especially, there are many young ladies who have been almost 
friendless for many years, in whom there has been an indomitable 
energy and an earnest desire to make themselves, by all possible 
culture, the peers of their more favored sisters, by preparing 
themselves thoroughly for all that may justly be regarded as a true 
woman's rightful work. 

It is a moral tonic to society to witness the progress of such 
girls. They combine a force of character which is manly with a 
tact that is beautifully womanly. They deny themselves. They 
are heroic. The greatness of the object they set before them ex- 
pands their character in its pursuit. The pressure upon them 
gives compactness to all their faculties. They are a spectacle to 
men and angels. One such woman cuts down the undergrowth 
and " blazes " a route for the feet of feebler sisters through the thick 
social forest. 

And yet they are women, with all the craving for sympathy, ap- 
preciation, and love which the great Creator has made a character- 
istic of their sex. An acute pain, not of jealousy and envy, often 
smites them when they naturally contrast their loneliness with the 
opulent surroundings of school-mates who have never to practice 
those small economies which make them seem mean, but which 
they know to be absolutely essential to a continuance of their 
studies and the successful completion of their course. When the 
class shall graduate there will be no father, mother, sister, or 
brother to take a fond pride in the honors which these uncheered 
scholars have gained. They carry no pleasure to parents or sisters 



FOR E VER Y FIRESIDE. 329 

or brothers. They have never had and will not soon have any do- 
mestics to care for their interests or to be cared for. The future 
seems very barren to such young hearts. 

My young friend, perhaps some such condition is yours. Let me 
speak a tender word to you. There are elements in your case from 
which you may derive much comfort. Every woman, however 
favored or unfavored by fortune, will have seasons of terrible trial. 
Such is woman's history eveiy-vvhere. When these trials come to 
you you will not have been weakened by early indulgence. Your 
classmate, whose position has seemed so enviable, may be called to 
endure the same blow which shall fall upon you ; but you will have 
been prepared, by all you have suffered, to endure the new distress 
with a fortitude which has been well trained. If called to walk a 
rough and stony road your feet will not have a shrinking, sensitive 
way, which makes the hard path intolerable. You will pass with 
graceful ease over obstacles the sight of which will make weaker 
women faint. 

Character is every thing. As men grow wiser they learn to found 
their admiration of women more and more upon character and 
less and less upon antecedents. You will be the very help-meet 
a strong young man will need and a prudent young man will seek. 
The light that is in you will shine. In this dark world the light 
attracts. And when he shall come to you, and join his fortunes for 
life with yours, he will find the firmest hand to uphold him in that 
which clasps him with a wifely love. And then your honor will 
grow. And then that esteem which is the solid foundation of all 
love that lasts will increase as those years come which break the at- 
tractiveness of those whose whole existence depends upon physical 
beauty or social surroundings. 

There is a beauty in strength. That beauty is yours. Keep on 
your way. There is room for you. All society fluctuates, but the 
right and the good are indestructible. It is for a wise purpose that 
the good Father has put you thus unpropped to grow. He has 
work for the vine, which must cling to the elm or to the trellis, and 
he has work for the solitary tree, which he causes to grow up into 
great bulk and strength on the wide and unprotected plain, or on 
the top of the bare, bleak mountain. 



330 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



But, whatever may have been the social antecedents of any 
young lady, there are reasons why she should not sit down in 
self-indulgent or in despairing idleness, but enter the large human 
society around her, to be an active element among her fellow- 
men. 

There are many public duties of religion to the strict and proper 
performance of which educated young ladies should very frequently 
turn their attention. Whatever influence is gained by the reputa- 
tion of being educated ought to be thrown upon the side of true, 
vital godliness, and in favor of all those movements which are made 
to plant the cross in every human heart. This is a busy time in the 
world. The uprolling of the night of ages which hung in darkness 
on the human mind ; the rapid development of physical science ; 
the sudden transmission of intelligence ; the power of the press — as 
the power of an uprisen sun flinging almost immediate light on a 
hemisphere — all these things have quickened the human mind into 
wonderful activity. Men are more enterprising than of old. It is 
little to go round the whole earth now for the purpose of compass- 
ing a point of policy or opening a market for trade. Amid all this 
stir, bustle, and noise, while caste is breaking and men are leaping 
the walls of national prejudices built through centuries of years, 
while old power is seeking to keep its own and new revolutions are 
seeking to overturn venerable establishments, there is unwonted 
activity among all the agencies for good and evil. Sin is finding 
more power in the animated depravity of the human heart. In- 
quiry is making free with ancient errors and time-honored truths, 
and Christ and Belial are meeting with more antagonism in court 
and camp, in the forum and in the market-place. 

This, then, is no time for the educated of either sex to keep 
still. Every woman must take her position in this conflict. You 
will fail of the great earthly end of your being educated unless 
you place yourself distinctly on the side of every good cause, every 
cause which labors for the elevation of humanity by the propaga- 
tion of the principles of the Gospel. This you may do without 
transcending the proper limits of female delicacy ; and to do your 
part in society you must always remember that you are a woman. 
With the graceful restraints of womanly modesty about you 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



33* 



you may make your mark upon the world, which shall be more 
powerful and influential than any inscriptions upon monumental 
marble. 

To do your share of the work of the world's regeneration, see 
what forms of error prevail immediately around you ; and without 
any romantic ideas of magnificent achievements in the moral world 
take your own neighborhood, and strive, not by lecturing, harangu- 
ing, and all that kind of agency, but by the inculcation of the 
opposite truth to extirpate the error. After all that is said, the 
best way of reclaiming the world from its fallow or brier-covered 
condition until it shall bloom as the garden of God is for each 
one to commence in the soil just below his feet and plant it thick 
with gospel truths, and then steadily work from that point forward 
until he shall faint in the furrows and fall on the field. Each truth 
is a vital germ which must live, must spring up, must propagate 
itself, when once planted. 

The Gospel of Jesus is to elevate the world. That Gospel is the 
storehouse of all saving truths. Endeavor therefore to do your 
part in making the particular church to which you belong a gospel 
church. You must be a thorough Bible Christian, and by your ex- 
ample and the thousand nameless influences which you can bring to 
bear endeavor to draw each professor of our religion up to the 
standard of the Gospel. If I might venture to say what are the 
two greatest defects in the Church generally, so far as I know it, I 
should mention a want of Bible knowledge and a want of Christian 
liberality. 

Let me urge you to endeavor to remedy these defects by a hearty, 
devout, and careful study of the Bible, the whole Bible, in letter 
and spirit ; by a special cultivation in yourself of liberality, both as 
regards sentiment and the appropriation of your pecuniary means to 
unselfish uses ; and then by a strenuous and skillful effort to lead all 
about you to become more and more deeply interested in gospel 
teachings, and to devote their means to the spread of the truth. 
As your own mind becomes more and more imbued with the 
principles of the Gospel you will take more and more pleasure 
in stirring a love for those beauties and truths in the hearts of 
others. 



332 



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Christian Duties. 

You may do much by giving your aid to your pastor in all his 
labors in which a member of the flock can assist the shepherd. A 
candid examination of his plans, and a cordial co-operation, will en- 
courage his soul, will hold up his hands, and will induce others to 
fall in with their influence, and thus build up your church. You 
can hardly appreciate the pleasure with which a pastor receives 
such tokens of interest in the cause of the divine Redeemer, to 
which he has devoted his life and his energies. 

Among other agencies there is connected with even- well-instituted 
church a Sunday-school. One of the greatest difficulties in man- 
aging such a school is to obtain the necessary number of the right 
kind of teachers. A Sunday-school teacher should be intelligent, 
well-educated, and self-sacrificing, as well as really pious. Merely 
to hear children repeat answers to catechism questions, to read or 
repeat passages from the Bible by rote, without understanding or 
appreciation, is not, I should think, discharging the duties of such a 
post. The teacher should have habits of study, and not shrink from 
the labor of investigating the Scriptures. By entering heartily upon 
this work you may make yourself, by God's blessing, a model teacher, 
may teach teachers, and bring the treasures of a cultivated mind to 
the elevation of the standard of instruction imparted. 

In the patient labors which you perform in this department you 
will be encouraged by two considerations : 

i. Many of the children in these schools obtain no other literary 
cultivation. If you do full duty toward your class you will have 
given them much. You will have instructed them in the idioms of 
their own language, will have taught them how to read the mother- 
tongue with propriety and elegance, will have stored their minds 
with much of the world's history, ancient and modern, and with 
many facts and principles of physical science, natural history, and 
geography. The amount of learning which may appropriately be 
imparted on the Lord's day is by no means contemptible. 

2. Remember that the future citizens of the nation, and members 
of Christ's Church, are committed to your charge to receive their 
initial training in morals and religion. Many of them have no op- 
portunity of learning their duties to God and their fellow-men except 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 333 

at your hands. They arc to become members of society, are to 
engage in the trade and commerce of the world, and at the ballot- 
box are to throw their influence for right or wrong into the councils 
of a growing commonwealth, now already one of the most powerful 
nations upon the face of the globe. By the blessing of the Holy 
Spirit upon your labors they will be brought into the Church ; but 
they will be strong or weak, wise or worldly, as you may give them 
the first spiritual bias. 

You may do much by visitations to the poor and uncultivated, by 
winning their confidence, by reading to them the word of God and 
the writings of devout men. Lady Colquhoun, of Scotland, ren- 
dered good service to her generation in a class for adults which she 
taught after church service on the Sabbath. It has occurred to me 
that many of our young ladies would find this a profitable exercise 
if pursued with humility, energy, and faith ; and there might be cir- 
cumstances which would favor the formation of such a class to meet 
at suitable week-day hours. 

You should make it a point of conscience to secure a knowledge 
of the operations of every society for the spread of the Gospel con- 
nected with your own Church, and as far as possible of those attached 
to other Churches. It is a shame to any person making pretension 
to be at all educated not to keep herself respectably informed of 
the plans and movements of such powerful institutions as the Amer- 
ican Bible Society and the American Tract Society. When this 
knowledge is gained it should be disseminated. You should talk 
these things over at home and in company, skillfully introducing 
such topics so as politely to throw aside the usual small-talk con- 
cerning dress, parties, and other frivolities. You will thus engage 
your heart and the hearts of others strongly on the side of the active 
benevolent operations of the Church. Your pastor will cheerfully 
assist you in gathering and scattering such useful information. 

There is one reform which, in this day, is engaging the intellects 
and hearts of the greatest and noblest spirits of our nation, and to 
which every educated young lady should give her distinct, earnest, 
and intelligent co-operation. I allude to the temperance reform. 
The vice of intemperance has gone so deeply down into the social 
system that it will require the most strenuous exertion of us all to 



334 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



pluck it out. But none have suffered so much from intemperance 
as women, and none should labor with tongue and pen and influence 
more earnestly than women. You should fill your mind with such 
an abhorrence of intemperance as to be unable to endure it in any 
form of pleasure or habit or gain which it may assume. By the love 
you bear immortal souls, and by the respect you cherish for your 
sex; by your fear of that retributive justice which may bring the 
poisoned chalice back to your own lips, and by the awards of God's 
dread bar, I charge and beseech you never, under any circumstances, 
to offer " strong drink " to man or woman or child, unless on good 
grounds for sanitary reasons. Men have been made drunkards by 
the witching grace with which young and beautiful women have 
presented them the wine-cup, and have gone forward, with a drunk- 
ard's madness, to beggar their children and break the hearts of their 
wives. I would as soon a glittering snake should cross my foot as 
that I should meet a lady in a social party urging on a man who 
admires her the goblet which contains her shame and his perdition. 

I hope better things of you. You will be expected to set your 
face against intemperance in every way. Shun the young man who 
drinks and let him know why you shun him. Listen to no words of 
wooing from the man who is not decidedly and notoriously opposed 
to the use and traffic of liquor. Let no man persuade you to link 
your destinies with his because he has just now reformed. He may 
have reformed, but, alas! the history of habit — of this particular 
habit especially — shows how uncertain is such reformation. I have 
known men take vows of abstinence simply that they might blind 
the confidence of young hearts; and others have, perhaps, sincerely 
thought thus to have made themselves really worthy the love and 
alliance they sought ; but in both cases the old habit has been too 
strong for the young vows, and they have made shipwreck, with a 
precious cargo of hope and love aboard. Wine so poisons brain 
and heart that no man who drinks — I do not mean the street- 
drunkard, but the man who indulges this vice in any measure — is 
worthy such love as yours. 

But the root of this great Upas-tree is in the traffic. Let not 
your smiles, your compliments, or any favor or countenance be 
shown to the man who makes or sells this social poison ; but coun- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 335 

tenance and sustain, to the extent of your influence, the men who 
are laboring in any ways that are sanctioned by the Holy Script- 
ures to extirpate this direful evil. Occasionally such a monstrous 
sight may be seen as a woman opposed to associations for suppress- 
ing intemperance. Such women # are very ill-informed, weak, or 
wicked. Do what you can to reform them. Let your whole sex 
unite its energies in this cause, and the time will come when no more 
wives will perish under a drunken husband's blows and no orphans 
live to mourn over a drunken father's disgraced grave. 

But your heart, my dear young friend, should be large enough to 
contain this world. While it is natural that your own immediate 
circle should most deeply interest you it is Christian that you have 
charity for the whole world. As much for him who hunts in African 
forests as for him who trades in American cities, for her who flings 
her baby to the waters of the Ganges as for her who cradles her 
offspring in English halls, did Jesus Christ the Saviour die. It is 
part of our Christian education to cherish the missionary zeal. It 
saves us from the belittling influence of selfishness and sectionalism. 
God has ordained that man shall be saved by man's instrumentality. 
The Church is bound to send the Gospel to the ends of the earth. 
We have too long slumbered over this imperative duty. It is time 
to arouse ourselves. Let no year of your life pass without your 
largest possible contribution of time, thought, prayer, influence, and 
money, to this cause which lies so near the Redeemer's heart. One 
reason why Christians discharge their duties at home so poorly is 
that they have not an enlarged sympathy with the race. Our peo- 
ple know too little of the spiritual destitution of other lands, and 
therefore do not value and support as they should the Christian 
institutions in their own vicinity. You are bound to make yourself 
acquainted with the wants of the world and, as much as in you lies, 
to supply those wants. What is a Christian ? What was Christ ? 
Are we to bear his name and have so little of his holy, sympathetic, 
self-sacrificing nature ? Make it your duty and your pleasure to 
arouse all around you to a keen feeling of their duty in this partic- 
ular. Labor modestly, patiently, and perseveringly to make the 
particular Church to which you belong a powerful auxiliary to the 
Church catholic in advancing the spiritual regeneration of the world. 



336 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

And now, my dear young friend, I have endeavored in a brief, 
simple, and affectionate manner, to answer the question at your 
heart, What now ? I have merely pointed out some courses of duty 
which, as an educated Christian lady, you will be bound to pursue. 
I have not said every thing which might be said. Your Christian 
intelligence will suggest many other things. If you have right prin- 
ciples they will come forth into leaves of gracious language and 
fruits of useful acts, and you will be like a tree planted by rivers of 
waters. 

Your Responsibility. 

You go forth with what a load of responsibility ! Remember the 
saying of your Saviour, " to whom much is given of him will much 
be required." You are not to be lost in the mass of uneducated 
women, nor in the contemptible rabble of women of fashion. It 
will be a sad thing for you to commence life aimless and float down 
to the ocean of eternity without strength to steer yourself and aid 
a fellow-swimmer. You go forth to do something. You go to write 
a record which shall not shame you in eternity. You go to leave 
your mark on the world, to open fountains whose waters shall flow 
in widening streams when you are housed with the shrouded. You 
are to be a lump of leaven in your family, in your Church, in the 
world ; and you must labor to leaven the whole. Be not discour- 
aged by the magnitude of your task. The Master asks no more 
than you can perform. Do all you can, and leave nothing undone 
which may be accomplished. The day whose night finds you with 
no increase of intellectual strength, no increase of learning, no ear- 
nest struggle with the evil of your heart and of the world, no good 
deed rightly done in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, will be a 
lost day — lost to you, but gone wandering into eternity to meet you 
in the hour when judgment shall be had on all your deeds and all 
your days. 

Life is for labor, death for rest, and eternity for reward. Faint 
not. There is an eye above you seeing every hope, every thought, 
every effort. It is the eye of the tender and unwearying Laborer 
for the world's redemption. He is not unmindful — to forget your 
labor of love. Man's praise or blame is but the modification of a 
worm's breath ; it can do you little permanent harm or good. But 



FOR E VER Y FIRESIDE. 337 

the approbation of Jesus is the life's end of angels and good 
men. 

Men honor success; Jesus honors intention. If you attempt great 
good things your reward in eternity will not be varied by any cal- 
culation of success or failure. Therefore toil on. 

You will be called to suffer. This is woman's lot ; the effects of 
woman's sin. But suffering may be beautiful ; this is the effect of 
the grace purchased by Christ's blood. You may bless your race as 
much from the room of sickness as from the teacher's seat. A les- 
son of patience under the rod may impress a powerful soul with the 
truth and glory of Christianity and send its influence to the heights 
and depths of human society. He that suffers patiently as much 
brings glory to the Saviour's name as he who labors energetically. 
One who has discharged every duty in health may, in God's name, 
embrace the couch of sickness as freely as successful ambition em- 
braces the throne of power. But what has an aimless, listless, or 
fashionable woman of pleasure to cheer and strengthen her when 
sickness and death shall come? Nothing done, nothing attempted ; 
life past a dreary desert, life to come a gloomy pit. Be not so, pre- 
cious friend, but daily plant the trees which shall bring forth flowers 
to strew your sick-bed and garland your grave. 

"So live that when the mighty caravan, 
Which halts one night-time in the vale of death, 
Shall strike its white tents for the morning march, 
Thou shalt mount onward to the eternal hills, 
Thy foot unwearied, and thy strength renewed, 
Like the strong eagle's, for the upward flight." 



"FOR HIM." 

A Short True Story. 

Two young ladies are studies for me. They are nearly the same 

age. Ellen Ethridge, the elder, is the more cultivated. Virginia 

Roberts is the more gifted, the taller, the more beautiful. They are 

unmarried, are cousins, are members of the same church, and are 

much together. Miss Ellen is very conscientious, Miss Virginia very 

impulsive. They are very pleasant, and both have many friends in 

common, while each has also her particular circle. They are both 
22 



338 



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my friends, and therefore I have substituted the names above for the 
real names. If I had time and skill it seems to me that I might 
make quite a story of what of their lives has come under my ob- 
servation. As I cannot do that I will simply place before my readers 
one phase of difference in these two interesting characters. 

Virginia has what I might really call the habit of going to Ellen 
for advice and never taking it. Ellen is impulsive, but her conscience 
governs her; Virginia is conscientious, but allows her impulse to 
sway her. It is her conscience which brought Virginia into the 
Church and sends her to Ellen for advice. It is her impulsiveness 
which makes her often go against the very advice she had sought, 
and do those things which stricter church members avoid. Ellen 
has had certain heart-experiences the memory whereof is, perhaps, 
quite solemn to her and therefore must be very sacred to others. 

Some time ago Virginia came to Ellen to ask her opinion about 
going to the opera and the theater. Now, she knew perfectly well 
what ground Ellen would take ; but whenever a new question arose 
she seemed to feel that just to have asked Ellen must be the dis- 
charge of her whole duty in the premises. This new question came 
in this way: Virginia had a lover. This gentleman had very loose 
notions of church obligations ; indeed, he did not believe in Church 
at all, and at heart was thoroughly irreligious. Virginia was very 
agreeable to him, but would have been more agreeable if she had 
had no church relations. He determined to proceed gradually in 
the work of loosening her church ties. Nothing could do this so 
effectually as drawing her to the opera and the theater. He was 
too shrewd to attack her creed and religious life openly. Indeed, 
sometimes he went to church and to other religious meetings with 
her, after he had told her how distasteful all such things were to 
him ; he made the sacrifice for her sake ! As she became interested 
in him how natural it would be for her to reason that if, for her 
sweet sake, he went to places of no interest to him it might be her 
duty to accompany him to his amusements, and how naturally even 
her conscience might be used by her impulses in leading her astray, 
under the suggestion that she might have more influence in draw- 
ing her lover to church if she accompanied him to places of worldly 
amusement ! 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 339 

It is not difficult to conjecture what advice she received from 
Ellen. " Virginia," said Ellen, " going to the theater is right or 
wrong or of doubtful morality. A woman should be very careful how 
she deals with doubtful things ; but a Christian has a plain rule : he 
must never do any thing the moral propriety of which he doubts. 
That's a fixed rule. The apostle teaches that he is condemned who 
does a doubtful thing. Now, Virginia, if it is not plainly your duty 
to go to the theater, then it is among the doubtful things. You 
needn't come to me about them; go to St. Paul." And Virginia 
went to the theater ! 

Of course a soul that takes that road soon finds it full of " forks." 
Her lover was always bringing her to the forks of the road. Ellen had 
in advance pointed out the difficulties of the case. " Virginia, your 
friend began to love you as a Christian. Can he love you as much 
if you cease to^be a Christian? The love which is without respect 
is a sickly passion and short-lived. Can he respect you if he finds 
that you are doing that which it troubles your conscience to do?" 

" But he may take a dislike to me, and quit me." 

" Would that be as bad as if he should not quit you and yet take 
a dislike to you? Have you ever considered that? He knows your 
duty as a lover of Jesus Christ. If he sees you proving yourself 
unfaithful to that love do you think he will entirely confide in your 
fidelity to himself?" 

" O, Ellen, you always put such things in such an awful way ! 
You look so hard at duty. You take no pleasures. You give up 
all the enjoyments of life." 

" My dear Virginia, listen to me," said Ellen, with a deep, grave 
voice. Then there was a pause. " Dear Virginia," Ellen resumed, 
" I once stood just where you do. You were then a little girl and 
knew nothing of my heart's sorrows. I had been married to Jesus. 
When I took my church vows upon me I was the mortal bride and 
he was the immortal Bridegroom. This holy union did not preclude 
the coming of a mortal bridegroom, but it was to sanctify every 
other love. Whatever love sought to come in between Jesus and 
my heart was to be regarded as base, and any leaning toward it on 
my part would be a defiling sin. Then he came — such a full type of 
young manhood ; so handsome, so strong, so learned for his age, and 



340 



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fresh from a German university. Never mind, I can't talk much of 
him. It was the old story. I was sweet to him in spite of my con- 
scientiousness, not because of it. The sight of that fact came to 
me. Then was I in my fiery furnace. Naturally I longed to go out ; 
to go walking the green fields with my charming young friend. But 
suddenly I saw One walking with me. I looked into his face and 
instantly knew that it was the Son of God, my immortal Bridegroom. 
' Will you stay with Me and let him go, or go with him and leave 
Me?' was uttered with a most ineffable smile. 0, Virginia, never 
to my dying day shall I cease to be grateful that grace was then 
given me to cling to him who is now to me the Chief among ten 
thousand and altogether lovely. Now, do not think I am unhappy. 
If I had given up all frivolities and the gay pleasures of the world 
and had nothing in return I should have made a bad bargain. And 
that is just the way the people of the world look at Christians, as 
if they had nothing in place of that which they surrender. You find 
a woman who never leaves the house, but is devoted to a life-long 
cripple, and you think only of what that woman loses. But that 
cripple is her son. For him she does it. She has all the pleasure of 
gratifying the maternal instincts, and then she has her son's intense 
affection in return. She is satisfied." 

There was silence for a while. Ellen had put such a tone into 
the phrase " for him " that it rang through Virginia's soul. She 
was not aware that she exclaimed aloud, " For him ! " 

" Yes, Virginia," resumed Ellen, " for Him ! You have reached 
the point where you must choose. Shall it be for Him who died 
for love of you, or for him who is striving to seduce you from alle- 
giance to the Divine ? " 

Silence again. Ellen was breathing deeply and slowly and reg- 
ularly. Virginia was almost sobbing. It became intolerable, and 
with the cry of " For him ! For him ! " she rushed from the room. A 
few months will show for which " him " her heart is to make its 
decision, and that decision will settle the question of her doom or 
her salvation. 

A few months did show. I write this several years after the pre- 
ceding narrative was written. Virginia yielded to her lover. She 
went his whole length of worldly gayeties until they married. Just 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 34 1 

before her marriage she discovered that her lover had a little daugh- 
ter. This was a great shock to her. But so powerful, was the 
influence the man had obtained over her that he found little 
difficulty in explaining that he was a widower, and that his great 
love for her made him afraid that she would not accept him if she 
thought she should be encumbered with a child. When a woman 
has given up her divine Lover for a man of sin, he becomes an 
infernal master. Virginia took even this new insult to her woman- 
hood. She felt that she had gone too far to retreat. She plunged 
forward. 

It was scarcely six weeks after her marriage when she came to 
me with a white and haggard face, which looked years older than on 
the day of her nuptials although even then it was shadowed. She 
could not then be sure that the man who had deceived her in so 
important a matter might not have other concealments the discovery 
of which would give her agony. She came to tell me that she was 
suffering the torture of being compelled to live in the house with 
the mistress of her husband, who almost daily subjected her to the 
most humiliating insults. She could endure it no longer, and was 
now seeking counsel of her friends as to the best method of secur- 
ing a separation from her husband. 

It would make a long story to tell of all she suffered while the 
legal processes drew their slow length along. It is sufficient to 
point the moral of this true story to say that Virginia is now a 
prematurely old woman without home, without husband, without 
child, without lover. She has learned a lesson. Will it do any one 
any good ? If she tell it as a warning to any other woman, who 
is young and is a Christian, and has a lover who does not love 
Christ, will it save that young Christian ? Did Ellen's story save 
her? But with these two pictures seen together may not some one 
be saved from going in the paths of the destroyer? 

A few Sundays ago I looked down from the pulpit upon Ellen 
and Virginia. The latter looked so faded and hopeless, the former 
so chastened, so steadfast, so peaceful. 

Remember, my daughter, that the man who will not give up every 
thing for Jesus Christ is not to be expected to make any sacrifice 
for you. 



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JAMES BRAINERD TAYLOR'S -MISS W ." 

Some of those situations in life which appear, at first sight, least 
favorable to extensive usefulness, may be so improved by a holy dis- 
ciple as to become a fountain of many streams. In the memoir of 
James Brainerd Taylor there is frequent mention made of a Miss 
W . The name of that lady was Pamela Wigton. While spend- 
ing the winter of 1839 m tne clt Y °f New York the Rev. Mr. Janes 
(afterward Bishop Janes) invited the writer of this sketch to take 
an appointment to preach every third Thursday night in a private 
house, in conjunction with himself and Dr. Bangs. The invitation 
was accepted. I found the place in the third story of a house in a 
small street in the lower end of the city. A long, dark, narrow pas- 
sage, where two persons could scarcely walk abreast, led to a wind- 
ing flight of stairs. At the head of this I found a room of mod- 
erate dimensions very plainly, but very comfortably and even neatly 
furnished. Propped with cushions in a rocking-chair sat a lady of 
about fifty-five years of age, very interesting in her whole appear- 
ance, but very emaciated, and almost unable to assist herself in any 
respect. The oftener I visited her the more and more lovely did 
she appear. For more than twenty years, I think she told me, she 
had been confined to her room, and a large portion of the time to 
her bed. Once she had been able to be carried carefully to a steam- 
boat and to go a short distance up the Hudson River. She suf- 
fered frequent and acute and sometimes protracted pain. I have 
sat for hours at her feet listening to her conversation, which was 
rich in memorials of many prominent persons and events, but still 
richer in a varied and profound Christian experience. Sometimes, 
for whole minutes, paroxysms of pain would seize her, and I could 
tell when they were coming by the increasing pressure of her hand ; 
and then she would be silent for a short time, and the twitching of 
her features betrayed the agony which the firm and devout expres- 
sion of her eyes showed she was endeavoring to endure in the 
strength which God supplies. Then her hand would relax and her 
features fall into their usual play, and, with an ejaculation of thanks- 
giving, a tear or two, expressed by pain, standing in her mild eyes, 
while mine were moist with sympathy, she would ask to be reminded 
of the subject of our conversation, and resume her remarks with a 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 343 

cheerfulness which I could scarcely comprehend. Every attention, 
ho matter how small, she would receive with, if nothing more, an 
appreciating look, which made it a pleasure to smooth her pillow, 
or adjust her cushion, or hold a cup of water to her lips. So beau- 
tiful was grace in her that it soon became a delight to be in her 
presence. Many a time have I walked whole blocks in a dark and 
rainy night, and often when in pain myself, to be soothed and strength- 
ened by an example which preached endurance with a wonderful 
power and a voice made musical by love. Though dim of vision, 
she seemed instinctively to know the state of my feelings from the 
tones of my voice ; and when, sick and jaded, I came to her from 
some public service, or from my desk, she would part my hair with 
her trembling hands and kiss my forehead with a motherly affection 
that made me feel like a child, and then talk to me of Christian 
heroism, and of the noble souls who have toiled in pain for the fade- 
less crown, till I felt the spirit of a man revived in me. No one 
knows how many an hour I have spent in that obscure place, nor the 
blessed influences which that holy invalid exerted over my youthful 
ministry. 

It was a preaching-place, as I have said. Those who heard Bishop 
Janes often know the peculiar character of his preaching — how full 
it was of Christ and Christian consolation. Perhaps some of the 
very finest of those thoughts and expressions which won the almost 
loving attention of the thousands who waited in crowds upon his 
ministry were uttered in that little room to half a dozen persons, 
Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians ; for all classes and denom- 
inations who knew Miss Wigton delighted in visiting her. By 
much the best sermon I ever heard Dr. Bangs deliver was preached 
at Miss W 's, from 1 Peter ii, 7: " To you, therefore, which be- 
lieve he is precious." The light that played on the invalid's face 
was a beautiful and forceful commentary upon the text and a strik- 
ing corroboration of the sermon. In the long period of her illness 
she had enjoyed the services of many of the Lord's servants, and 
her recollection of their discourses and conversations furnished her 
with abundant materials for the entertainment and edification of 
her visitors. 

Who would not say, at first sight, that her scope of labor and of 



344 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



usefulness was very limited ? She was sick, weak, in pain, confined to 
her room, subsisting upon the benefactions of others ; withal, she had 
no superior intellectual gifts, and had had very little advantage of 
education. And yet her influence was felt in the far West of Amer- 
ica and in Europe. By the assistance of her friends she maintained 
a correspondence with Christians at great distances, who had been 
profited by her example and conversation. I acted as her amanuensis 
in writing to a clergyman in the West, who had entered the ministry 
as a man would enter upon the practice of the law. After a few 
years of almost utter uselessness he became acquainted with Miss 

W . She soon found that he " had not the root of the matter 

in him," that he was destitute of a proper knowledge of salvation, 
and had no personal interest in the atonement. She commenced to 
make his deficiencies manifest to himself. He became convinced 
that he was a sinner. His agony for some time was very great ; but 
with a holy wisdom she led the stricken sinner to the Lamb of God, 
and there at her feet he was converted, and returned to his people a 
new man in Christ Jesus, ready to do a great work. When John 
Summerfield commenced his ministry in America he received much 
spiritual nursing from this mother in Israel. She loved him dearly. 
It was delightful to hear her talk of that young disciple. When 
James Brainerd Taylor first went to New York, as a subordinate 
clerk, I think, in some establishment, he was very thoughtless and 

wayward. His brother took him to see Miss W . She became 

interested in him at once and succeeded in winning him to her. 
There was nothing querulous, peevish, disagreeable, or repulsive in 
Miss W . The young could love her. She soon gained a mas- 
tery over the mind of young Taylor. By degrees she interested 
him in religious subjects, and then in the subject of his personal 
salvation, until " the day dawned and the shadows fled away," and 
he was a free man in Christ Jesus. The Lord led him to the work 
of the ministry, and during his preparatory studies he was instru- 
mental in turning many from darkness to light. The Lord took 
him from the evil to come, but not before he had opened springs 
which shall flow down through the history of the Church. The let- 
ters which he wrote to Miss W she preserved as a sacred 

memorial of his excellence and holiness. Some of them appear in 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 345 

his memoirs, and I have had the pleasure of having for a short time 
in my possession the little green bag in which they were so carefully 
deposited. 

What an example of endurance in these latter times ! No mis- 
sion to China or to the islands of the sea could be sublimer than 
hers. She was a living witness to the triumphs of faith over pov- 
erty, suffering, and confinement. She was poor, but made many 
rich ; she was unknown, and yet well known ; she had nothing, and 
yet possessed all things ; she was dying, yet behold she lived ! How 
many young ladies in our churches would look upon imprisonment 
for twenty years in a chamber of sickness as being a prolonged 
death. O, ye daughters of ease, learn to look upon your lives in 
the blaze of fortune and fashion as despicable when compared with 
hers ! Ye that are sick and poor, and wish to do something for your 
Lord, " learn " not only " how sublime," but how Christian and how 
useful "a thing it is to suffer and be strong." A holy life — that is 
usefulness. Holiness of heart, in His members, is the lever with 
which his people must lift the world to lay it at the feet of Christ. 
If all the young were like Taylor, and all the aged and suffering like 

his Miss W , how lovely would Christianity become in the eyes 

of the world, and how powerfully would sinners be attracted to the 
cross ! I have written this sketch in the hope that the example to 
which it points may not be lost upon young women, who by and by 
may be afflicted and in old age. There is no power in the universe 
to stay the irresistible influence of any human being whose soul is 
sanctified by the Spirit and whose life is devoted to the work of 
Christ. 



MARY LYON AND LADY COLQUHOUN. 

I have mentioned Mary Lyon as one of the greatest of her sex. 
Let me earnestly request you to give a careful reading to every 
page of The Power of Christian Benevolence Illustrated in the Life 
and Labors of Mary Lyon, compiled by Edward Hitchcock, D.D., 
LL.D." * Keep it in your library. It will probably do you more 

* Published by the American Tract Society. 



346 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

good at your present stage than any other. If you can, visit her 
school at South Hadley, Mass. 

A much inferior woman was Lady Colquhoun, of Scotland. Her 
memoir, written by James Hamilton, D.D., of London, is published 
in New York. She might be much inferior to Alary Lyon and yet 
be, as she was, a shining light in her circle. I make an extract 
from her Journal : 

" I have begun a new plan at our school on Sundays — a class for 
grown-up girls. They commit nothing to memory. But I explain 
the Bible and catechism. . . . The class is flourishing and always 
increasing. Several old people attend regularly, and I hope to have 
more. ... I have a pretty large congregation, and it needs some 
nerve. But I hope to be able to go on, and I hear it is much liked. 
May God send a blessing ! " 

Her biographer adds : 

" These Horce Sabbaticcz were not only very popular, but became 
extremely useful. During the week her ladyship studied with much 
care the passage which she intended to explain, and exerted her- 
self to find anecdotes and illustrations which might render it more 
interesting and memorable. Her manner was full of calm benevo- 
lence and mild persuasion ; and, whatever nervousness she might 
feel, her address was so fluent, natural, and dignified, that the 
thoughts of the audience were solely directed to the subject. In 
unison with that devout and holy life which they all knew that 
their instructress led those exhortations were singularly impressive. 
On a dying bed more than one of her young hearers gave evidences 
of having been by this means brought to the Saviour ; and from 
the grateful tenderness in which many of the survivors hold their 
teacher's memory it may be hoped that all her works have not yet 
followed her." 

If space allowed I should be pleased to give other extracts from 
her ladyship's journal, and her biographer's remarks upon the right 
and wrong manner in conducting such classes. But you may read 
the book. 













Kv 




- f 





- 



;; 





^ 



s 



v 




V 






FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 347 

PHOEBE CARY'S HYMN. 

A correspondent has asked us to furnish Phoebe Cary's hymn, 
"One sweetly solemn thought," etc. 

This hymn of our late beloved parishioner has appeared in many 
versions, some of which damage the poetry while they fit the stanzas 
to music. There was no special tune in her ears or in her mind 
when she wrote it. The theme came to her one Sunday morning, 
in 1842, as she was returning from church. She sat down and wrote 
off very rapidly the verses which had formed themselves around 
that theme. These she afterward carefully corrected and published. 
They became immediately popular. 

The latest version was made under the following circumstances : 
One day she was ushered into our back parlor as we sat with a sprained 
ankle in a vessel of water. She was almost always very bright and 
witty, and for awhile her conversation was very gay ; she was cheer- 
ing her imprisoned and perhaps impatient pastor. When the con- 
versation turned on graver topics he made this remark : " Phoebe, 
it's amazing how many hymn-books there are and how few are the 
hymns that are sung. Now, here lies a book used by a large denom- 
ination. It contains over a thousand hymns. I have gone over 
them all and marked every hymn I have heard sung or quoted in 
whole or in part, and there are very few over two hundred that are 
marked, and less than a hundred that I have heard frequently. 
Other hymns, of course, may have been used and heard by other 
persons, and so the total might be set down at three hundred. It 
would seem that three fourths of .the hymn-books had been printed 
and carried about for the sake of the useful one fourth." 

" Why," said she, " don't you know that there are not three hun- 
dred hymns in the language that are worth using, or that will live a 
hundred years?" Then, after a pause, she added: "Let's make a 
little book that will have the three hundred best." 

" Agreed," was the answer. 

After she left the conversation was considered. One evening we 
said : " Are you ready to begin that hymn-book ? " " Yes," she 
replied. We went at it. We gathered all the books we could find. 
Over twenty thousand metrical compositions in English, German, 



348 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

and Latin, were examined. Three hundred were selected. Some 
were inserted, removed, and re-inserted. Some were removed and 
never replaced, but stood so near the line we had marked that if 
others for any reason had fallen out of line those would have taken 
their place. Thus came the volume called, Hymns for all Chris- 
tians. Subsequently, after Phoebe's Cary's death, the poet Whit- 
tier wrote us that in his opinion there were only about twenty 
hymns in the language that were in all respects worth the name, 
" and thee has them all in thy collection." 

It was while we were at work on this collection, in her room over 
the parlor in the house in Twentieth Street, in which Alice Cary 
died, that we said : 

" Now, Phoebe, let us put in your ' Sweetly solemn thought.' " 

" O, that was not written for a hymn." 

" Nevertheless people will sing it, and as I have allowed you to 
insert hymns on your own independent judgment, and one of mine 
is among them, it is my turn now. Yours shall go in." 

"Well, I'll look it over and fix it up. Posterity never did any 
thing for me, but I suppose I must do something for posterity. I'll 
re-write it just as I want it to stand forever, and I'll never touch it 
again." 

And the following is that last version : 



One sweetly solemn thought 
Comes to me o'er and o'er ; 

I'm nearer my home to-day 
Than I ever have been before. 

Nearer my Father's house, 
Where the many mansions be; 

Nearer the great white throne, 
Nearer the crystal sea ; 

Nearer the bound of life, 

Where we lay our burdens down ; 
Nearer leaving the cross, 

Nearer gaining the crown : 

But the waves of that silent sea 
Roll dark before my sight, 

That brightly the other side 
Break on a shore of light. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 349 

O, if my mortal feet 

Have almost gained the brink, 
If it be I am nearer home 

Even to-day than I think, 

Father, perfect my trust : 

Let my spirit feel in death 
That her feet were firmly set 

On the Rock of a hying faith. 



After the death of Alice, Phoebe's health and spirits failed almost 
at once. In her last sickness, when she was very low-spirited, we 
tried to cheer her one day by repeating to her a story about her 
hymn which had appeared in the Boston Daily News. It was 
this : 

A gentleman in China, intrusted with packages for a young man 
from his friends in the United States, learned that he would probably 
be found in a certain gambling-house. He went thither, but, not 
seeing the young man, sat down and waited in the hope that he 
might come. The place was a bedlam of noises, men getting angry 
over their cards and frequently coming to blows. Near him sat two 
men — one young, the other forty years of age. They were betting 
and drinking in a terrible way, the older one giving utterance con- 
tinually to the foulest profanity. Two games had been finished, the 
young man losing each time. The third game, with fresh bottles of 
brandy, had just begun, and the young man sat lazily back in his 
chair while the older shuffled his cards. The man was a long time 
dealing the cards, and the young man, looking carelessly about the 
room, began to hum a tune. He went on, till at length he began to 
sing the hymn of Phoebe Cary above quoted. The words, says the 
writer of the story, repeated in such a vile place, at first made me 
shudder. A Sabbath-school hymn in a gambling den ! But while 
the young man sang the elder stopped dealing the cards, stared 
at the singer a moment, and, throwing the cards on the floor, ex- 
claimed : 

" Harry, where did you learn that tune ? " 

"What tune?" 

"Why, that one you've been singing." 

The young man said he did not know what he had been sing- 



350 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

ing, when the elder repeated the words, with tears in his eyes, 
and the young man said he had learned them in a Sunday-school 
in America. 

"Come," said the elder, getting up; " come, Harry; here's what 
I won from you ; go and use it for some good purpose. As for me, 
as God sees me, I have played my last game and drunk my last 
bottle. I have misled you, Harry, and I am sorry. Give me your 
hand, my boy, and say that, for old America's sake, if for no other, 
you will quit this infernal business." 

The gentleman who told the story saw these two men leave the 
gambling-house together and walk away arm in arm, and he 
remarked, in writing it out : " It must be a source of great joy to 
Miss Cary to know that her lines, which have comforted so many 
Christian hearts, have been the means of awakening in the breast 
of two tempted and erring men on the other side of the globe a 
resolution to lead a better life." 

It was a great comfort, as she testified to us and to others. 

And now, since we have been drawn into writing about this be- 
loved friend, we will add another thing. Several years ago we were 
invited to address the young ladies of the Seminary in Charleston, 
S. C. Among other things we insisted upon patience at literary 
work, and told our fair young hearers that the writers of both 
sexes who had achieved success had been painstaking. Young 
ladies dash off stanzas that sound musical to the ears of the writ- 
ers, and send off the first copy to the editor of some magazine, 
and are surprised that they are not accepted. It was not so with 
Phcebe Cary. She wrote and rewrote. She rewrote the stanza be- 
ginning " But the waves of that silent sea " eight times. We 
thought we could lay hands on that particular autograph, but 
failing to do so we furnish another specimen of Phcebe Cary's 
handwriting. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 353 



FOR YOUNG MEN. 



THE TRUE BASIS OF MANHOOD. 

[Delivered before the Faculty and students of Hampden-Sidney College, Virginia, 1856.] 

Gentlemen : When your invitation, so generously expressed, first 
made its appeal to me, it found me in the midst of manifold en- 
gagements which taxed my strength and occupied my time. The 
pleasure of seeing so many young men as are collected at this seat 
of learning, so many who are hereafter so powerfully to influence 
the destiny of this republic ; the pleasure of seeing so many older 
men, wmose presence is a blessing because they have enriched with 
large learning the spirit which they have purified by the sweet offices 
of piety — men who have already made their mark upon the age — 
these and all the fine excitement of this literary festival came with 
their potent temptation to a brain and a heart wearied with the 
daily toil of a laborious life ; and I consented to push aside a por- 
tion of my work in order to gather my cluster of thought to con- 
tribute to this interesting occasion. 

Almost as soon as I had accepted the invitation the reaction of 
the severe excitement of my winter-work came on me. Apologies 
are awkward things, but perhaps it is due you to know that the pages 
I have prepared to read you have been written by a propped invalid, 
in such intervals as, with shaded eyes, he has ventured against his 
physician's remonstrance to arrange a few paragraphs which, for 
the truths they contain, he humbly hopes will be accepted as the 
token of the will he has to achieve greater and better things. 

What the world wants now is men, largely and well developed 
men. Your business is to make yourselves such by all the educa- 
tion your circumstances will allow ; my business is to endeavor to 
afford you encouragement and stimulus in this lofty work, by con- 
siderations which shall commend themselves to your judgment and 
your hearts. 

In his renowned treatise Uept f Yi/>£wc the ancient critic Longinus 
quotes from the Book of Moses and points to the passage recording 



354 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

the blazing fiat " Light be ! " with its simple historic supplement 
" Light was ! " as a remarkable example of the sublime. When 
one stands at any point of view before the face of material nature 
and sees how light paints the tapestry of the vaulted sky, and glows 
in the gold and emerald of the varied earth, and leaps and laughs 
amid the flashing billows of the phosphorescent sea — when he re- 
members how every beauty sleeps in stupor until the lips of the 
light kiss it into existence — he grows in wonder at the creative 
power which spoke a blaze of life and loveliness over the sunless 
world. 

But, gentlemen, if the present speaker were called upon to select 
from all the writings of men and all the recorded words of God the 
loftiest specimen of the sublime of power, he should find it in that 
same book of Moses, but not in any thing connected with the make 
and furniture of this goodly world or the startling of systems into 
existence. "And God said, Let us make man!' That was the 
loftiest thought in the divine mind. That was the grandest strain 
in the Oratorio of Creation. And then MAN stood forth — the Mont 
Blanc among the Alps of existences ! 

Apart from the wonderful elements which conspire to make man 
— apart from the steady reason, traveling in the strength of a giant 
along the highway of thought — apart from the excursive imagina- 
tion, trying its wing where the ether is rarest, and scattering from 
that wing worlds of furnished beauty as the eagle flings the sea-surf 
from its pinions — apart from the hopes, perhaps the prophesyings, of 
immortality which sound their harp-notes in every chamber of his 
faculties and speak of an expanding life to come — apart from all 
these there is much to interest us in the surroundings and rela- 
tions of man, and much to make each of us desire to be still more 
a man in all the fullness and richness of the complete development 
of the better elements of our nature. 

The very first thought which occurs to us on this topic is the re- 
lation which man bears to the material universe around him. We 
will not assume the truthfulness of the Mosaic account of creation. 
Let us take facts. The material creation must have existed before 
man, whether the world be eternal or was created, or this won- 
drous frame came to its status by the fortuitous concurrence of 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



355 



eternal atoms, which concurrence inaugurated itself before the ad- 
vent of man. Man came. He cannot have been eternal. The 
nature of mind and the facts of the past leave no room for philoso- 
phy, in its insanest dreams, to believe that. Now, he is either the 
result of this fortuitous concurrence, or he is a creature, the embodied 
will of a higher mind. He comes of Tt%?/ or Zsvc, Chance or God. 

Is it chance ? Look at the world. There are the splendors glow- 
ing in the vault above and dancing over the earth beneath ; there is 
all that indescribable opulence of magnificent combinations of 
beauties, clustering in crystals, waving in trees, sparkling in watery 
orbs, and wreathing itself in rippling streams ; there is all the music 
sighing along the shore, pealing in anthems over the seas, moaning 
among the forests, tinkling in caseades, and making the mountains 
roar by the blasts it blows along the paths of crushing avalanches ; 
there is a perfume which steals to the vault of nature's cathedral 
from the myriad painted censers which open themselves in the 
hearts of the beautiful flowers ; there is the great lore of the uni- 
verse, written with the pen-characters of stars in the illuminated 
volume of the firmament or monumented in the eternal hills of 
granite, or cabalistically locked in the cabinets of nature, inscrip- 
tions in disjointed foil, waiting the electric flash to bring out their 
powerful truths. How came all this ? Came it of chance ? 

But when you have surveyed all these wonders, these rarities, 
these exquisite fittings, these perfect pictures, this inconceivable 
array of magnificences and miniatures — all the precise beauties the 
microscope detects, all the grandeurs the telescope finds flaring in 
the further skies — remember that without yourself, or some other 
man, some mind to throb and glow and kindle at the touches of 
beauty — remember that all this library of philosophy and poetry is 
locked up ; remember that here is the grandest possible gallery of 
paintings where there is no eye to behold it, telegraphic whisper- 
ings over all the woven lines of the world without an ear at the end 
of the wires to catch the intelligence and re-telegraph it to a sensi- 
tive brain. Remember that, without man, here is a new grand 
city, built up with walls that have towers and gates higher than the 
Hypsistae of Thebes, built with wide streets paved with precious 
stones, crowded with mansions having saloons and chambers and 



356 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

cloisters, columned and fluted and painted, a city made sacred by 
temples and shaded with groves and cooled with fountains, a city 
for multiplied millions, and yet a city whose streets have no 
promenaders, whose workshops no artisans, whose mansions no in- 
habitants, and whose temples no worshipers ; a city silent, not be- 
cause the living have died there, but because no pulse ever stirred 
its awful stillness. 

But man comes ; and how suddenly all things show their fitness! 
The lines from the circumference of the universe find their center 
in him. Music has an auditor, perfume a sensorium, and every 
beauty is reproduced upon a surface as sensitive as a nerve and 
more enduring than the flaming sun. Man comes ! He has a key 
for every cabinet and a cipher wherewith to read every hieroglyphic. 
He comes ! And there is life and beauty and power every-where. 
He comes and reports the universe to itself. He lays his mind bare 
to all things, and this material world which is passing away makes 
its inscription there, and thus the perishable becomes immortal. 

Did " chance " make all this preparation for the grand advent? 
Or did chance first fitfully build this universe without regard to its 
august inhabitants? And did it then perceive that it had designed 
without design ; made progress, but toward no end ? And did it then 
seize the whole chain of existences at both ends and bring the ter- 
mini together in this new fortuitous product, this link which holds all 
links together and makes the whole sparkle with splendor and leap 
with life? Did chance do all this? Why, then, chance works such 
miracles as faith reports of God. And I am asked to believe in 
blindness groping its way to the completion of works of perfection, 
instead of full-sighted wisdom and power, willing and achieving. I 
will do no such thing. I see : my God must at least see ! 

Gentlemen, the universe of matter may or may not prove the ex- 
istence of a wise, powerful, and beneficent Maker ; man, considered 
by himself, in the construction of his body and the endowment of 
his mind, may or may not prove the same proposition. But look 
at the fact that without man every thing is nothing, that with him 
every thing flies to a high value ; look at the fact that, without the 
world of matter, man is a reporter where there are no proceedings, a 
clock rolling its hands over an unmarked dial-plate, a mirror 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 357 

where there is nothing to reflect, a microscope where there is noth- 
ing minute, a telescope where there is nothing afar, a sun where 
there is nothing to shine upon. But when man is introduced to 
nature, when he steps down upon the platform of matter, all nature 
feels him and he feels all nature. When he stands up in the power 
and glory of his new life and shouts to the roaring sea, shouts to the 
mountain-top, shouts to the trembling stars, " I am ! I live, I think, 
I feel ! " the seas, the mountains, and the stars give back the shout 
" God is ! God thinks, God feels ! " All the streams that flow rush 
toward the mighty reservoir of his mind and heart. All the fit- 
nesses connect, every diapason of the universe rolls its concord of 
sweet sounds, the diaeresis of nature is removed, and it syllables the 
name of God. 

No wonder that to the highest ancient mind the idea of chance 
was supplemented with the idea of Providence, and thus while the 
name was retained the notion was utterly annihilated by being dei- 
fied, and from the realm of shadows and the floating threads of acci- 
dent the mind fled away to the substantialities of a directing power 
and the strong cords of a divine Providence. Hence Pindar sang 
of what was done gvv Qeov rvxa, by the chance of God, and even the 
soberer Herodotus qualified rvxa with the epithet of Qsia. The 
universe being, and man being therein, there must be a God. We 
are thus led by considering man's relation to the physical universe to 
consider his relation to God and thus to the spiritual world. 

What is God? What relations does man bear to him ? These 
are very interesting questions, which we do not propose to preach 
upon, but to look at simply as the questions have bearing on the 
growth of our manhood. In all the theories we find one or the 
other of these elements : God is the creature of man or the maker 
of man. The former is largely common. When a French philo- 
sophical lecturer said at one stage of his course, " Gentlemen, I now 
proceed to create God," it was not very startling to his audience; 
but when it came to be repeated in the orthodox circles of this 
land it seemed revolting and blasphemous. Gentlemen, he only 
said he was going to do what many of us often do without the 
calm preliminary announcement. In their theories and in their 
numbers, in their discourses and in their systems of living, too 



356 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

cloisters, columned and fluted and painted, a city made sacred by 
temples and shaded with groves and cooled with fountains, a city 
for multiplied millions, and yet a city whose streets have no 
promenaders, whose workshops no artisans, whose mansions no in- 
habitants, and whose temples no worshipers ; a city silent, not be- 
cause the living have died there, but because no pulse ever stirred 
its awful stillness. 

But man comes ; and how suddenly all things show their fitness! 
The lines from the circumference of the universe find their center 
in him. Music has an auditor, perfume a sensorium, and every 
beauty is reproduced upon a surface as sensitive as a nerve and 
more enduring than the flaming sun. Man comes ! He has a key 
for every cabinet and a cipher wherewith to read every hieroglyphic. 
He comes ! And there is life and beauty and power every- where. 
He comes and reports the universe to itself. He lays his mind bare 
to all things, and this material world which is passing away makes 
its inscription there, and thus the perishable becomes immortal. 

Did " chance " make all this preparation for the grand advent ? 
Or did chance first fitfully build this universe without regard to its 
august inhabitants? And did it then perceive that it had designed 
without design ; made progress, but toward no end? And did it then 
seize the whole chain of existences at both ends and bring the ter- 
mini together in this new fortuitous product, this link which holds all 
links together and makes the whole sparkle with splendor and leap 
with life? Did chance do all this? Why, then, chance works such 
miracles as faith reports of God. And I am asked to believe in 
blindness groping its way to the completion of works of perfection, 
instead of full-sighted wisdom and power, willing and achieving. I 
will do no such thing. I see : my God must at least see ! 

Gentlemen, the universe of matter may or may not prove the ex- 
istence of a wise, powerful, and beneficent Maker; man, considered 
by himself, in the construction of his body and the endowment of 
his mind, may or may not prove the same proposition. But look 
at the fact that without man every thing is nothing, that with him 
every thing flies to a high value ; look at the fact that, without the 
world of matter, man is a reporter where there are no proceedings, a 
clock rolling its hands over an unmarked dial-plate, a mirror 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 357 

where there is nothing to reflect, a microscope where there is noth- 
ing minute, a telescope where there is nothing afar, a sun where 
there is nothing to shine upon. But when man is introduced to 
nature, when he steps down upon the platform of matter, all nature 
feels him and he feels all nature. When he stands up in the power 
and glory of his new life and shouts to the roaring sea, shouts to the 
mountain-top, shouts to the trembling stars, " I am ! I live, I think, 
I feel ! " the seas, the mountains, and the stars give back the shout 
" God is ! God thinks, God feels ! " All the streams that flow rush 
toward the mighty reservoir of his mind and heart. . All the fit- 
nesses connect, every diapason of the universe rolls its concord of 
sweet sounds, the diaeresis of nature is removed, and it syllables the 
name of God. 

No wonder that to the highest ancient mind the idea of chance 
was supplemented with the idea of Providence, and thus while the 
name was retained the notion was utterly annihilated by being dei- 
fied, and from the realm of shadows and the floating threads of acci- 
dent the mind fled away to the substantialities of a directing power 
and the strong cords of a divine Providence. Hence Pindar sang 
of what was done cvv Qeov rvxa, by the chance of God, and even the 
soberer Herodotus qualified rvxa with the epithet of Qeta. The 
universe being, and man being therein, there must be a God. We 
are thus led by considering man's relation to the physical universe to 
consider his relation to God and thus to the spiritual world. 

What is God? What relations does man bear to him ? These 
are very interesting questions, which we do not propose to preach 
upon, but to look at simply as the questions have bearing on the 
growth of our manhood. In all the theories we find one or the 
other of these elements : God is the creature of man or the maker 
of man. The former is largely common. When a French philo- 
sophical lecturer said at one stage of his course, " Gentlemen, I now 
proceed to create God," it was not very startling to his audience; 
but when it came to be repeated in the orthodox circles of this 
land it seemed revolting and blasphemous. Gentlemen, he only 
said he was going to do what many of us often do without the 
calm preliminary announcement. In their theories and in their 
numbers, in their discourses and in their systems of living, too 



358 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

many of our philosophers and poets, our lecturers and practical 
men are hewing out an image which they pedestal amid the altars of 
sacrifice and cry to their souls, " These be thy gods, O Israel ! " 
But they are not God ; they are not supreme over the universe of all 
mind and feeling, of all form and fact, although they hold a petty 
supremacy in the hearts that make them. Truth, the great icono- 
clast, levels these images. It is a terrible thing for a heart to love its 
God, even when that is a false god. Every human heart shrinks 
from atheism ; for atheism is that great vacuum which nature abhors. 

It is not only true that man must have a God, but it is equally 
true that the character of the worshiped Deity is to produce upon 
his own character the most prodigious modifications of which it is 
capable. For this very reason, in addressing a body of intellectual 
young men I prefer ascending from the ephemeral topics which float 
about them to the grand presence which perpetually and silently 
presses their characters to their final forms. 

Among the many systems in which God is presented to the ac- 
ceptance of man there are two which now mainly divide the intel- 
lectual world ; namely, Pantheism and Christology. There may be 
small sects and individual philosophers who object to falling into 
either of these classes, and yet, throwing minute differences aside, 
we shall find the philosophy and poetry of the world ranging them- 
selver under the general divisions. Let us look at them. 

Pantheism teaches that the whole material and intellectual world 
is God. It either started with this broad general proposition or 
worked it out by processes. This puts God entirely out of sepa- 
rate existence. Matter could never become mind. Matter could 
never be matter and not-matter at the same time. The statement 
to nav earl Qeog is identical with Qsog eonv ovrig. To say that the 
flowers and fruits, the beauties and powers of the universe, that 
whatever things are reportable by the senses are God, is a very fine 
theory for the flowers and fruits, but is destruction to the idea of 
God — makes us see, it may be, something more of beauty in what 
can be painted upon the perishable retina, a membrane which an 
infinitely small puncture will destroy, but takes from the soul's eye 
the whole view of the infinite repository of all the types of beauty 
and all the germs of power. It magnifies the statue and invests it 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



359 



with radiance, but excludes from the conception the teeming brain 
of the sculptor in which the idea first stood up, and the cunning 
hand which practically realized and embodied that beautiful idea in 
substantial marble. 

Let us not consider this a subject of slight importance, to be 
thrown to the metaphysicians, the poets and the transcendental 
dreamers of a vain philosophy. It bears it directly upon the 
growth of our manhood. We cannot make any thing of a man 
until we can give value to his relation to God. And let us do jus- 
tice to every theory. It is a bad mental habit to embrace in a 
general damnatory formula every theory or system which does not 
square with our standard of orthodoxy. We must meet error, not 
in its weakness, but in its strength. If the Christology of our Bible 
be true the strongest presentment against it is Pantheism, for the 
reason that this system, without question, has the next claim to be 
considered beautiful, powerful, and consistent ; has the greatest 
fascination for the intellectual and is most easily comprehended and 
received by the masses of the uneducated. And whoso watches 
the waving to and fro of the branches of the trees that grow by the 
modern Helicon, whoso watches the wanderings of modern philoso- 
phy, must, I think, perceive that, in turning from the great Former 
of all things, Intellect is throwing itself into the arms of Nature ; the 
spiritual weakens, the sensuous strengthens, and the great human 
mind is worshiping the foot-prints and forgetting the presence of the 
majestic Being whose movements leave the glorious records of his 
passage. 

If Pantheism be the strongest presentation adverse to Christi- 
anity, the strongest form of Pantheism is that modern shape it has 
assumed in making man to be God. If I understand the process of 
the logic in this case, nothing is until it becomes something in man, 
as there is no color without the eye and no sound without the ear; 
and then, when all things have been gathered into man, man is 
gathered out of himself, is refined, sublimated, deified, and ex- 
cludes all other deity from the domain of thought and feeling. The 
most logical, powerful, and eloquent advocate of this theory in 
modern times is perhaps Feuerbach, of Germany. Let us have, in 
brief, the result of his close analyses ; analyses which he says he has 



3 6o CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

subjected to the severest scrutiny, historical and philosophical. The 
processes we have no space for, and the results must be given shortly : 
On the speculative doctrine of God he holds that " God is thought 
cognized by us." " Man is nothing without God, but also God is 
nothing without man ; for only in man is God an object as God ; only 
in man is he God." " Faith separates God from man, consequently 
it separates man from man ; for God is nothing else than the idea of 
the species invested with a mystical form." It follows that " Man has 
his highest being, his God, in himself; not in himself as an indi- 
vidual, but in his essential nature, in his species." " God is man's 
highest feeling of self, free from all contrarieties and disagreeables." 

This theory, when it comes to regard God in the light of intellect, 
maintains that the pure, perfect, divine nature is the self-conscious- 
ness of the understanding (man's understanding), the consciousness 
which the understanding has of its own perfection." As to the 
moral essence, " Love is God," which is a very different idea from 
that of the apostle, "God is love." Love — man's love for himself, for 
others, for the species — " love is the true unity of God and man, of 
spirit and nature," says Feuerbach ; and he adds that " love is ma- 
terialism ; immaterial love is a chimera." He qualifies, however, by 
the statement that " love is also the idealism of nature; love is also 
spirit, esprit." He sums up the whole in his formula " Homo homini 
dens est." 

Perhaps this critic whose mode of stating the theory we have 
used would object to being broadly called a Pantheist, as in one part 
of his writings he charges Pantheism with swallowing up man, 
But this theory is Pantheism seen from the other side — man swal- 
lowing up all things in himself. The older forms of Pantheism 
placed no value on the materials or the dynamics of the universe ex- 
cept as they found them understood by man. It matters nothing 
whether we take the best of all for our God, or the best of the best 
of all. Man is the great spokesman of Nature, the great represen- 
tative of things extant, and we need not bewilder ourselves with 
superfine distinctions. In any thought of God the physical world 
must have its place, and we are ready to admit that the theory now 
presented is the finest, highest, and most beautiful form of atheism 
— atheism which is the denial of a personal Creator and governor. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 361 

Now, gentlemen, over against this doctrine that man is God 
stands Christology, the doctrine that God became man. Both rec- 
ognize the idea of deity. Both meet on the common ground of 
man's need of divine connections. But they have no other funda- 
mental principle in common. Christology holds that before the 
worlds, before the ranks and chains of beings animate and inani- 
mate, rational or material, there is an eternal personal existence, a 
being having thought and feeling and power ; that his will flowered 
out into the physical world ; and his will enkindled the flames of 
mind, and that his will endowed all other beings with their several 
powers and faculties. It further teaches that to achieve a grand 
work, to elevate the nature of man, and to accomplish his own pur- 
poses aside from man, this supreme Creator and governor became 
man, took upon him the nature of the creature he had formed, 
gathered on his own heart every nerve of sympathy which thrills in 
this sensitive creature, married his divinity to our humanity, in a 
manner inexplicable to us, but completely breaking down the bar- 
rier between us, letting man into God and God into man ; and that 
this God-man and man-God still lives in this union which has no 
divorce ; and that he has all the normal feelings of God and all the 
normal feelings of man. He is the visible God. Who looks on 
him sees man, and whoso looks on him beholds God. 

The object of this discourse is to inculcate the theory that the 
only right and full development of our manhood must take its base 
upon the doctrine of Christology and draw its life and power there- 
from, and that the Pantheistic doctrines, the very best after the 
Christian, are wholly unable to give us either starting-place or im- 
petus for growth. 

We lay against Pantheism, however stated, these objections : 

I. It has no Personal God. There is no noumenon not dependent 
upon phenomenon. There is no starting-point of existence, no be- 
ginning-place of life and thought for man. There is no Being to 
address in prayer. What do men gain to their minds and hearts 
who address the god that is the universe, the god that is the human 
species? Simply a grand rhetorical figure — a larger prosopopoeia; but 
they speak to ears that have no tympanum, they parade the sores 
of their wounded hearts to eyes that have no retina, and they pour 



362 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

the doleful cadences of their lamentations upon a heart that has no 
sympathy. From the temple of this ideal god they return without 
consolation and without a benediction, except such vain and insuffi- 
cient solace as their natural stretching out toward an ideal god 
forces up from the depths of their own spirits. But it is because 
the wells of our hearts are either too shallow or too dry that we 
seek for another, for one having greater depths of being in himself, 
for one who can give us protection because he is higher than we. 

To feel the direness of this defect, go ponder the apostrophes 
which heart-wants have wrung from genius, from the days when the 
Grecian bards told the achings of the spirit on the harps of old 
down to the sorrowful sobs which fill the notes of Shelley's exquisite 
poem " Alastor." Mountains the loftiest, forests the grandest, 
streams the most beautiful, light that paints all, distance lending 
enchantment, worlds upon worlds in trooping procession, may en- 
rich the imagination, but they are meaningless all — all disconnect 
and lessonless, all crowded with riddles that puzzle and mysteries 
that confound, until their Lord and Master appear ; and then these 
impersonalities that seem like lost children, clinging together be- 
cause they are lost, suddenly show themselves to be ministers of 
his, moving at his bidding, and waiting at his throne. And they 
all, having nothing to say of themselves, when he, the personal Crea- 
tor, appears, break into the adoration Ao%a gov, 6 Seoc rj^av, doga gov. 

2. Pantheism takes no account of the origin of man. It assumes 
him, reasons upon him, makes a god of him, but does not say 
whence he is or whether he be eternal. It can never satisfy itself 
about him. At one time he is a drop, swallowed up in the ocean of 
to nav; at another all things are appearances and nothing really is 
but man ; all things are simply because he cognizes them, and when 
he no longer thinks of any thing that thing no longer is ; so that 
whether he made the universe or is the last effort of the universe 
to produce, he cannot tell. The great question Whence am If so 
natural to every intelligent being taking thought of the fact of its 
own existence, is a question to which Pantheism has never professed 
to have a satisfactory answer. It carries the mind back and back, 
until a great blank wall, higher than man's highest thought, deeper 
than his profoundest conjectures, blocks up all the past. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 363 

3. If Pantheism has no ancient history, so it has no prophecy. It 
tells man nothing of his future. He is here. Where his race was a 
hundred years agone, where he will be a century to come, is not in- 
timated. Some stray breath, flitting over the surface of the great 
ocean of things, probably caught up the waters and fretted it to a 
bubble. Man is that bubble. The great sea rolls and chafes, and 
some vast bounding billow or some small diminishing curve will let 
out the breath and the bubble will be no more. Or, if the higher 
view be taken, and he stands with all the threads of thought and 
feeling in the universe knit upon his heart, he will pass away, and 
what will become of all his present connections he cannot even 
conjecture. He feels that when he shall die, and rot upon the rot- 
ting earth, the finest, beautifulest, and most exquisite thing will 
perish ; that he now is, with every capability for being very high 
and very glorious, and yet for him there is no platform higher than 
the present. Whatever stimulus to exertion the idea of immortal 
existence may afford Pantheism destroys. As the past is closed to 
investigation so is the future. In the eager longings of his soul 
man presses forward, and within an arm's length he finds another 
great wall built up before him, and whatever may be splendidly at- 
tractive in the future is shut out from him by a masonry of solid 
darkness. 

4. Nor does this theory furnish any system of duty. It has no 
ethics. Duty is the obligation growing out of relations and en- 
forced by authority. But there are no relations in Pantheism. 
All things stand together, but they have no connection. There are 
disjecta membra, but no head. There are no authorities in the 
universe except those fatal compulsions of forces whose existence 
must be acknowledged, but whose final tendencies can never be 
ascertained. There is no one governing will. So all moral order 
vanishes under this system when carried to its logical termina- 
tions. It would seem that there must be right and wrong, and an 
everlasting distinction between these, and an infallible mind decid- 
ing all mooted questions which involve this distinction. But Pan- 
theism leaves all loose. Its god is the highest conception a man 
can have of mankind, his most elevated notions of the best quali- 
ties of every member of the race, combined in one, in one abstract 



364 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

conception ; not one person ; in a notion which has no intellect, no 
emotions, no will, no authority. And when is a conception high 
or low, there being no standard? I have never heard that ques- 
tion answered by the Pantheists. Does each man have a separate 
god ? Or, is God the highest thought of the highest man and 
the highest thought of the lowest man at the same time? The 
abandonment of a personal authoritative God involves all these 
difficulties. Inclination should be law under this theory, and each 
man's inclination being law it is not difficult to see how soon the 
crossing orbits will precipitate a general crash. Then where will 
virtue be? 

5. There is no philanthropy in this system — no love for man as 
man. If I love my brother it is not because he is my brother, but 
because of whatever he holds in common with all other things. I 
love him as I love a wondrous gem, a fine statue, a beautiful picture, a 
sweet flower, or some bright particular star. The fact is, there can be 
no brotherhood where there is no father. The geologic formations, 
the constellations, are as much brothers as men and men. Now, 
there is nothing which, according to the general estimation, so 
marks and glorifies a man as the love he bears his brother man. 
The finest passages in the history of the race do not chronicle the 
successes of selfishness, but the achievements of philanthropy. 
And, gentlemen, it is among our instincts to love our fellow-man. 
Thrown upon whatever isle, surrounded by whatever beauties or 
horrors, the arrival of a man, of whatever man, speaking whatever 
language, and wearing whatever garb, is a relief and a comfort. 
My heart goes out to him as his comes to me, and we form 
a brotherhood instantly, even if it must be done by gesticulation. 
Moreover, a disposition to segregate one's self, to fly from the race, 
to seek unbroken solitudes, is an indication of insanity. Does not 
this stretching out of my arms toward my brother argue a per- 
sonal, thinking, feeling, regulating father ? And is not the absence 
of all stimulus to this love, of all rebuke to selfishness, of all 
acknowledgment of living links through the kinship of hearts, a 
glowing proclamation that the system of Pantheism is radically, 
essentially, and irremediably defective ? 

6. Lastly, we urge against Pantheism that the highest poetic 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 365 

element is not in it. We do this boldly in face of the fact that 
much of the "faculty divine " has been employed in uttering the lays 
of this faith. Pantheism has its domain of poetry, undoubtedly. 
Whatever of physical beauty can move the mind and heart may be 
sung by the poets who hold this theory ; but the solemn religious 
idea of beauty, the highest and holiest refinement of thought, is 
absent. If it ever appears to be present it is borrowed from Chris- 
tology, for if the high-sounding terms which occur in the philo- 
sophic poetry or poetic philosophy of Pantheism be brought to the 
test of the logic of the system they disappear immediately. Spirit, 
the finest form of existence ; kinship, the strongest tie of beings ; 
immortality, the first, the last, the most hungry yearning of the 
heart — these three exquisite, subtile, yet principal elements of 
poetry are not really in Pantheism. So here, upon its most 
vaunted ground, we meet it and boldly charge it with being most 
deficient in the very element on which it most plumes itself. 

Now, take the mighty contrast which Christianity affords, and you 
can no longer hesitate on which foundation to build up your man- 
hood. 

1. Christology, in the front of all its teachings, impresses the doc- . 
trine of a personal God. W T e are held by no such vague notion as 
a God who is the " Natura naturans" — while all other existences 
are the "natura naturata" — a fatal power working unfeelingly/pro- 
ducing beauties which do not thrill it and the sensitive beings with 
whom it can have no sympathy, but a Being, a Spirit, having a heart 
to prompt, an intellect to plan, and a power to execute. It can- 
not be charged that the God of Christianity is, after all, a mere 
notion, an assemblage of the ideas of life, power, wisdom and good- 
ness. If it were so the reply is at hand that that is all the most 
scientific atheist or Pantheist knows of matter — all men acknowl- 
edging themselves totally ignorant of matter beyond what they 
know of its attributes. But Christianism does not hold out life, 
power, wisdom, and goodness, to be worshiped ; it presents a 
living, powerful, wise, good Being, as the object of worship. And 
this is an immense difference. If all matter should suddenly go out 
of existence there would be no god, according to Pantheism ; ac- 
cording to Christology if all the worlds should disappear and I re- 



366 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

mained there would be two persons in the universe, God and I, not 
I the god of myself, but I, belonging to, ruled by, and responsible 
to that other Being, between whom and myself I should recognize 
an infinite difference in position, but an intimate nearness of kin- 
ship. And then, if I should expire, God would still exist, complete 
in all his personality and attributes, and able, at a word, to fill 
all vacancy with new and beautiful worlds and new and gifted 
beings. 

Gentlemen, it is this personality of the God of Christianity which 
lies at the foundation of all intellectual and moral progress. Phi- 
losophy must have some starting-point and the affections some rest- 
ing-place. These are afforded by the theistic doctrine of the Bible, 
and by no other system. Hence the spread of Christology is the 
progress of philosophy. Fastening our clue upon the Deity we 
may penetrate the forest of matter and the labyrinth of mind and 
find our way back again. Thus it is that mental science has found 
its most successful workers among those who hold to the cross of 
Christ, as Bacon and Newton, Leibnitz and Locke ; not to speak of 
other lights in the firmament of mind. 

The affections are intimately connected with the operation of the 
intellect. The heart must have ease, if the mind is to perform its 
calmest, strongest, and most enduring work. And when that heart 
is lacerated philosophy can do nothing for it, as philosophy by its 
maxims cannot heal even a fleshly wound. In the doctrine of the 
God-man all the heart's wants of love and sympathy are supplied. 
The Highest stoops to the lowest and gathers every ligament of 
every heart upon his own. 

Thus the representation of a personal God, holy in his nature, 
creating all things by his power, sustaining all by his presence, with 
a heart loving man so that he delighted in his conception of man 
before producing him ; delights in him when produced ; loves him 
when all astray in intellect and all polluted in heart by reason 
of sin ; • loving man so as to manifest his personality in the un- 
mistakable attributes of a human body ; teaching him by a lofty 
living example, by impressive words, by all a glorious life and 
wondrous death for his salvation, how beautiful is holiness and 
how noble is philanthropy — this representation, this simple grand 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 367 

system of doctrines, precisely fits every demand of humanity. On 
the cross of the God-man the desire of God and the needs of man 
have met. Strike out the personal God, and our intellect swings 
in the air. Strike out the personal man, and our heart swings in 
the air. 

2. This system gives us a reasonable and satisfactory account of 
our origin. Whether true or false no other system does this much. 
The Christian representation is wholly worthy, being endowed like 
man. The reasonableness of our proceeding from the everlasting 
Father and the grandeur of our being children of the almighty 
Maker of the insensible yet magnificent creation, satisfy at once the 
demands of reason and the cravings of our spirits. The reason 
why we came is as lofty as our manner of coming. To send our 
faculties out to search the universe, to collect its treasures of beauty 
and sublimity ; to bind ourselves to every other man, and with 
self-steering power to move across the ocean of existences, bearing 
our freighted spirits toward Him from whom are all things and for 
whom are all things, how unspeakably does this transcend the Pan- 
theistic view of a floating drift, started for no purpose, moved by 
the chance influences from without, guided toward no haven, and 
existing for no end ! 

3. Christology gives a system of ethics with infinite and everlast- 
ing sanctions. No other system does. This shows me my relation 
to God as my father and to man as my brother ; and then it brings 
in a new and more glorious relation — God becomes man, and sets 
man thus in a peculiar relation to his Maker and to his mate. 
Hence the whole system, and hence the whole authority of duty. 
Go ask your philosophers, falsely so called, the meaning of 
" ought " and " ought not," and they will give you a few gran- 
diloquent phrases which, probed to their center, are found to be 
heartless, and have no claim to attention except as they simulate the 
teachings of Christology. But those binding words gather their 
power to hold society together from the cross of Christ and the new 
order of affairs thereby inaugurated. 

4. Then there is the whole force of the revelation of immortality, 
which belongs solely to the Christian system, coming in to dignity 
man's nature, to animate his spirit, and to prompt him to the very 



368 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

greatest possible industry in self-culture. Why should I endeavor 
to carry my manhood up to its highest point of development, even 
if it could be done on earth, when there stands over the block of 
marble which I am chiseling out to the full representation of my 
ideal a terrible apparatus which is to crush the statue as soon as I 
shall have brought it to perfection ? Where is the sculptor whose 
arm would not be paralyzed by such an arrangement as this? But, 
gentlemen, it is a well-ascertained fact that we never do come to our 
perfection here. We are workers ever onward and upward. We 
are students ever, and he is the humblest, wisest, and most laborious 
student who has had longest time and largest skill to ascertain both 
his defects and his capabilities. If the grave is to end all and hide 
all the best effort is of little worth and the most of our laborious 
life is worthless. But the teachings of Christianism silence these 
benumbing lessons of Pantheism. We live now, and we may live 
forever. The buds of boyhood become the blossoms of manhood, 
and the blooms of manhood may fetch fruit beyond this life and 
propagate themselves by seeds whose germs are indestructible and 
in a soil of exhaustless fertility. Every act becomes what the old 
historian wished his work to be, kttjiml eg aei, a thing for M forever." 
Every word goes syllabling amid the melodies that take their un- 
ending dances through the spiritual universe. Every record is 
lodged in the archives of immortal thought. This life becomes 
beautiful with the radiance of the life beyond and grand as the 
majestic infancy of an intellectual and spiritual sovereignty which 
shall wave its scepter when the suns, the moons, the stars, the solid 
masonry and the painted tapestry of this material universe shall 
have rolled their faded splendors down to the sepulcher of all 
wasted things. 

5. Here we find not only the rational system of philotheopy, but 
the true theory and vital power of philanthropy. Every chain 
which can captivate my intellect and affections to my brother is 
forged here. Every exemplification of love for man which omnis- 
cience can invent and almightiness execute is found in the God- 
man, Christ Jesus. His incarnation the sacred book calls the 
epiphany of the goodness and philanthropy of God our Saviour. 
[Titus iii, 4, in orig.~\ Here, where we have the sublimest example 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 369 

of self-abnegation for the advancement of the race, we kindle our 
affection for our brother and enter upon labors, which, however 
painful, shall carry their tide of beneficence down by every channel 
worn by human tears. 

6. And lastly, to make the contrast complete, the poet of Chris- 
tianity, while he gathers from all the world the glory and beauty 
thereof, and thus sings in concord with the poet of Pantheism, soon 
leaves him on the mountain-tops and tries his own wing far out of 
sight, far beyond the empyrean, ranging amid, ranks and orders of 
spiritual beings, and making his circuit in a light not seen on sea or 
shore, the purple light of immortality. Whatsoever is delicate and 
beautiful, whatsover is lofty and grand, whosoever there be of moral 
sublimity, of exquisite loveliness and touching sensibility — all things 
fine and noble ; all things thrilling and cheering; all things purify- 
ing and exalting ; all things enduring as eternity, mingle in the Te 
Deum of the anthems of Christianity. 

So, then, gentlemen, with all its pretension the theory of the 
Pantheist fails as the glorious theory of the cross succeeds in 
answering every demand of man's intellectual, emotional, and 
aesthetic nature. Under Christology man reaches the finest culture 
this life can give, and then carries the processes forward amid the 
most favorable circumstances of a spiritual existence which is to 
open its fragrant morn of splendors on the dreamy eyes of death. 

If time allowed we might carry our examination of man's rela- 
tions to the interesting connections he has with the past as enrich- 
ing him, and to the influences he may project through all the 
future, thus securing to himself a double immortality ; to the rela- 
tion he bears to the species and the effect of mankind, the whole 
body of living, thinking, acting beings, upon each individual of the 
species. Rich as these fields are in stimulus to self-culture, they 
cannot be entered now. 

Perhaps it would have been more in accordance with the method 
of the times if I had sought to excite you with reasons which lie 
within the circle of a refined selfishness, by all those stimulants 
which trade and ambition supply. But they have sufficient elo- 
quence to plead their own cause ; and I have been willing to lay 
myself open to the charge of dullness amid circumstances which 



3 ;o CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

would seem to demand brilliance if I could but help any youth 
among you to find a sufficient basis for a lofty character. To that 
end I have led you away from the urgency of these busy, rest- 
less times to the highest themes suited to the calmest moments 
of your most tranquil self-investigation. 

Gentlemen, it is to be presumed that each of you desires in some 
sense to be a philanthropist. If so, this indicates at once the 
highest cast of character in yourselves and the noblest purposes to- 
ward your race. I come to each of you with the earnest exhorta- 
tion that he strive to make himself a man, in all the highest, widest, 
noblest meaning of that term. Believe me, younger brother, the 
very best benefit you can confer upon your race is to present in 
yourself the finest possible specimen of nobly-developed humanity. 
Lured by the phosphorescence of false systems you may waste your 
time and your energies and do no other good than carcasses at the 
mouth of a monster's cave, warning the traveler to go in haste 
past the spot where you fell- But if you will recognize the per- 
petual presence of the Maker of the universe; if you penetrate 
yourself with the feeling of your responsibility to him ; if you will 
remember that the tie which binds you to the universal Father is 
that which binds you also to your fellow-men ; if you will feel that 
every act you perform is, by its performance, rendered immortal 
and projected into eternity; if you will energize your spirits, not by 
the contemplation of the classic grandeur of Promethean agony 
and endurance, but by the holier, the more humane, the more 
god-like, the more transforming vision of Him who drank the 
drugged cup of human sorrow on the cross of shame, you shall 
grow to the fullness of the perfect stature of manhood. 

My friends and brothers, I have been a dreamer just like you. 
The labors and sorrows of life have aroused me to the stern 
wants of my spirit. I have lingered by the founts of song and 
followed philosophy by the shadow of its trailing robes through 
aisles of sacred groves, and I have listened to the voice of more 
than one Ancient Mariner, and am thus a sadder and I hope a 
wiser man. From the fierce conflicts of life, from the heavy cares of 
my position, I have turned aside — how gladly ! — to say to you with 
all the earnestness of my nature that there is no worthy manhood 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 37 1 

which does not know its relations to God, its fellows, and its future. 
I have come to tell you that he can never become a philanthropist, 
a lover of his brother, who has never become a lover of his God. 
I have come to tell you that before you can become a saviour in 
any sense to others you must in some sense have suffered a cruci- 
fixion. All the great have trod this terrible pathway before you. 
All the great have found that between the baptism of fire which set 
them apart for their work and their final ascension to the stupen- 
dous rewards of eternity there lay Gethsemane's dread agony and Cal- 
vary's crown of thorns. These you cannot escape. But then comes 
the glorious exaltation ; then comes the initiation into the grand 
society of the celestial philanthropists, and every bloody foot-print 
you leave behind you on the pilgrimage of beneficence shall grow 
brighter and brighter with the ages, and the long procession of toil- 
ing generations coming after you shall fall down and kiss the spots 
made radiant by your painful pioneering, and bless the men who 
through humiliation and suffering have led the way to everlasting 
dignity and joy. 

Let us be men — men such as God thought of when he first 
spoke of our creation ; and living such, and dying such, when we 
ascend the higher spheres the sons of God who shouted for joy 
when we were made shall render homage to the manhood Jesus 
wore and which we have not disgraced; and, when our spirits rush 
back to the embrace of our everlasting Father, angels and God 
will be glad that ever, amid the grand utterances of eternity, JEHO- 
VAH said : " Let us make man ! " 



SUCCESS IN LIFE. 

[Abstract of a Lecture delivered to the Students of the University of the City of New York, 1886."] 

In common with all other young men, students consciously or 

unconsciously set before themselves a goal which they call " success 

in life." Nor, if it be properly placed, is the running toward that 

goal to be condemned on grounds of morals or despised on grounds 

of philosophy. The success of individuals is the success of nations, 

and the success of nations is the success of the race ; and certainly 
24 



372 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



the universe points toward success as being the final end. It is, 
therefore, very reasonable and very proper that young men should 
inquire into the elements of success. In pointing these out I have 
nothing novel to announce, as I have made no discoveries; I have 
only seen what all thoughtful observers must have seen : that there 
are five things that enter largely into the making of a successful life 
for any man. 

First, there is integrity. The man must be quite sure that his 
life has been unbroken by the bribes of the world, and the com- 
munity about him must believe that he is incorruptible. He must 
settle certain principles, and to these principles he must adhere 
through all phenomenal loss and gain. He must believe that the 
greatest gain there is on earth is less important than his settled 
moral principles. So he must be ready to live and die by them, 
absolutely unshaken by the storms of fate. He must neither dread 
nor avoid great tests, nor must he despise or seek small tests of 
incorruptibility. A man who holds to his integrity can scarcely be 
supposed to be perpetually remembering that he is incorruptible ; 
but in college and in counting-house and in society men are con- 
stantly subjected to the small tests, and intelligent observers of char- 
acteristics notice those testings and remember them. 

For instance, in my boyhood Nicholas Biddle was President of 
the United States Bank, and probably at that time the most influ- 
ential man in Philadelphia and one of the most influential men in 
the country. In the employ of the bank was a clerk who had dis- 
charged his duties with exemplary fidelity. Six days he would 
work, but the seventh day he held himself bound to observe as Sab- 
bath. There was an old mother to support, and from his slender 
salary there had been no very great savings. One Saturday Mr. 
Biddle assigned him work which would cany him over his Sabbath 
hour. He respectfully declined, but expressed his willingness to 
work until twelve o'clock on Saturday night and resume at twelve 
o'clock Sunday night. His adherence to this determination lost 
him his place. It seemed very cruel that in the service of God he 
should be brought to this suffering. In a few weeks his little sav- 
ings began to come to their end. The prospect before his beloved 
mother weighed heavily on his heart. At that juncture a new 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 373 

financial project arose in Philadelphia, the leader of which went to 
Mr. Biddle to secure the nomination of a man whom the syndicate 
could thoroughly trust with every cent of their money. To the 
surprise and delight of the discharged clerk Mr. Biddle nominated 
him as a man who would starve rather than do wrong. 

To this modern instance was added the example from the most 
ancient literature, the account found in the book of Job ii, 1-10 
[which was freely commented upon as showing how the nature of 
true men, that of devilish tempters, and that of Mephistophelian 
critics, has been unchanged through the centuries]. No class has 
been in college two years, no men have been in business five years, 
whose standards of right and wrong are not well known among 
their acquaintances. But whatever any man may have, in any sphere, 
of any real gifts, of any apparent graces, without the foundation of 
integrity the whole superstructure will fall. 

The second element of success is intelligence. This may be taken 
to mean both the capability of learning and the learning acquired. 
All knowledge is power, even the most superficial knowledge. Some 
Irish laborers were striving to move a great weight of stone. There 
came by a specimen of that wonderful evolution of modern times 
which we call the dude. This little creature, with legs not much 
larger than his cane, and one glass in one eye, as he tripped along 
saw these great fellows working at the mass they wished to displace. 
He had happened — in the New York University or elsewhere — to 
have learned something about mechanical principles. So, without 
removing his dainty glove from his little fingers, and while holding 
his cane in his left hand, he simply took the crow-bar and so adjusted 
it as to give it the leverage which enabled him to throw the huge 
stone out of place with one hand. 

The man who wishes to succeed must try to succeed in some one 
line. 

A man may have the most general information and be a failure in 
every thing he undertakes. He must not only be quick to see where 
his knowledge is wanted, but he must have the knowledge that is 
then and there wanted, and that is the real intelligence that gives 
success. 

The third element of success is energy. To several persons has 



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been attributed the saying, ''impossible is the adjective of fools." 
But whoever said it, and whether it be exactly true or not, we all 
do know that there is something in men which can be cultivated ; a 
something which carries them forward ; a something which keeps a 
soldier marching when comrade after comrade has dropped at his 
side ; which keeps many a swimmer's head above water while he pulls 
for the shore ; a something which is not fanaticism, nor even enthu- 
siasm, and certainly is not passion. No young man can fail to see 
the difference between a free Alexander, knowing just how to place 
the head of Buchephalus to the sun and having the courage to leap 
on the back of his famous steed, and Mazeppa bound upon a horse 
he cannot control, but which carries him through bush and bramble 
and forest and flood. The one is the type of energy, the other is the 
representation of a man who by the cords of his habits is bound to 
the steed of his passions. It is not the blustering braggart that is 
the man of energy — his energy is worthless — but the man who has 
steady push, that pushes and pushes and pushes till something gives 
way. If only by enthusiasm, by fanaticism, by passion, he had been 
started on his career, he never would have pushed through all 
obstacles of his case and his time and have had his immortal 
reward. 

The fourth element is industry. It is very easy to make mistakes 
as to this. There are young men going through college who appear 
to be the very busiest, and certainly are the very fussiest men in 
the classes. It is wonderful how they seem to work — how many 
engagements they have, how many plans — and yet when the year's 
end has come there is nothing gained, nothing done. It has been 
nothing but restless indolence. True industry is systematic devotion 
to useful pursuits. What may be useful at one time of life is cer- 
tainly not always useful at another. It may be very useful in vacation 
to be shooting, boating, and riding ; these things are certainly not 
very useful in term-time. If any of the young men of the university 
go into mercantile business it will certainly not be very useful for 
them while so engaged to spend twelve hours a day studying the 
ancient classics and the higher mathematics, useful as that course 
may be in college. That which does me the most good now is the use- 
ful thing to me, and if a man is to succeed in college and after college 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 375 

he must be a man of industry. Fools dream of luck while wise men 
work. Genius is the talent for holding one's self to one's work. 

There is a fifth element of success especially to be considered by 
young men. We shall call it economy, but the word must be under- 
stood in its classic sense. In the lower ordinary sense it is a valuable 
thing. We Americans have despised economy ; we thought it was 
mean. Our custom has been to go to a hotel in a foreign country 
and ask for the best rooms regardless of price. No matter what 
may be a young man's income in his own right, or his allowance 
from his parents or guardian, it behooves him to see not a dollar of 
it is wasted. It shows bad mental endowments or training when a 
man wastes any thing, no matter how much of it he may have. But 
you are asked to think of economy in its original, which is the noblest 
meaning: the laying out of a mans whole life as one furnishes a 
house, the management of all a man's income in outlay as one 
runs a household. That will of course include his furniture, his 
dress, his habits, private and public, his amusements, and his inter- 
course with his fellow-students and society. How to get the most 
out of his money, out of his dress, out of his time, out of his life — 
that is a man's economy. 

A traveler starts on his journey with a good store of food along 
a road where there are places where he can certainly find something 
to eat. Beyond a certain point he knows not whether there is any 
thing or not. Now, plainly, it is poor economy for the traveler to 
eat up his whole stock and neglect to purchase while he is passing 
the holstelries on the road — which may lead him through a desert 
before the journey ends. 

A man who uses the grandest economies in his life, whether that 
man be rich or poor, will not be forgetful of the past ; will not mis- 
use the present ; will take into consideration all the future, so far as 
practicable, without being frightened or misled by it. A man will 
study his seconds of time and his pennies of money, and seek to get 
only a dollar's worth for a dollar, but a whole dollar's worth for that. 

Now, those of us who agree upon these five points as indisputable 
factors in a successful life will please observe that this structure is 
to be raised upon some basis of philosophy. It is to be built 
upon a philosophy whose basis is that there is nothing but nature ; 



376 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

that in matter, and in matter alone, is the existence of whatever is 
seen, and the promise and potency of all things whatsoever. If not 
upon this then upon the other philosophy which, involves the super- 
natural. In other words, upon materialism or religion. 

Carefully examine whether incorruptibility of character can be 
maintained by a belief in a philosophy which forbids all conception 
of the greatness of heroism and the despicability of unmanliness, 
giving to these two no more virtue nor vileness than it gives of the 
one to the mountain and of the other to the cess-pool. Consider 
whether you can maintain your integrity by believing that there is 
no other integrity to the human spirit than that which belongs to 
the yet unbroken rock. Consider whether a better basis is not that 
religion which makes virtue immortal, something that cannot be 
swallowed up in any floods or lost in any cataclysms of the universe. 

Try intelligence on the basis of materialism, and of either Juda- 
ism or Christianity, both of which have the basis of supernatural 
religion. Suppose I can acquire the knowledge of Von Humboldt, 
and know that that can only serve me down to the death-day, and 
can only serve my successors down to that time when the cooling 
processes of the universe shall have frozen them out of sentient 
existence — have I such a support to the cultivation and furnishing 
of my intellect as supernatural religion affords me, which offers to 
put an immortalizing touch both on the spirit that gathered the 
riches of knowledge and the wealth acquired? 

Passion is a great power, but a very temporary power ; but that 
is, perhaps, all that materialistic philosophy can allow. Faith, a faith 
which is not only " the substance of things hoped for," but is just as 
much evidence to the spirit of the existence of things not seen as 
the impression upon the retina is to the brain of things that are 
seen. This faith that takes hold of the future, the future of unend- 
ingness, is not this faith, instead of being an occasional stimulant, a 
perpetual healthy tonic to the soul ? 

If a man can save nothing, if the whole universe is to go down 
and out, how can he maintain devotion to any pursuit, and how can 
any pursuit a long time seem useful ? If the whole loom is to drop 
down at nightfall how can I all day keep plying the shuttle? But 
if the woof of my daily life is to be shot through the web of that 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. ^>77 

which is unseen and eternal have I not such a basis for industry as 
no other philosophy affords ? 

Is life worth living? It depends upon what you mean by life and 
by living. If by life you mean the end that comes at the grave, 
and if by living you mean such an outlay to save every portion of 
time and opportunity as has been described in economy, then, prob- 
ably, no. But if life be the beginning of life that never ends, then, 
certainly, yes. 

I have presented these views feeling that if there be but one world 
success is better insured thereon by bringing to bear upon that world 
the power of that other world which may not exist ; but, believing 
as I do, in both worlds as parts of a great whole, I have no hesita- 
tion in expressing my opinion upon this subject. Start in the fresh- 
man class of this year a score of young men, ten of whom in brawn 
and brain and weight, and other physical endowments, are equally 
matched with ten others, and let these latter ten enter upon their 
career with a fixed and earnest faith in both the natural and super- 
natural, in the world that now is and the world that is to come, and 
let the other ten have an equally strong conviction that there is no 
such thing as that we call the supernatural, and it will not be difficult 
to predict which set of men in the university, and beyond, shall out- 
strip the other. A priori, we should suppose it to be so ; a posteriori, 
the history of careers has shown it to be so. 



THE GREAT CENTENNIAL LESSON. 

[Written May, 1889.] 

The whole country has been stirred with glowing accounts of a 
naval, military, and civic celebration in the city of New York, in 
which on the second day the march of eleven miles of soldiery, in- 
cluding the President of the United States, and the governors of 
many of the States, was witnessed by over a million of people from 
every State in the Union, and probably from every country on 
the planet. 

As a pageant it was splendid, probably it was unequaled by any 
thing ever seen anywhere, at any time, in any place. The specta- 
cle has passed away and all its visible glory melted like a rainbow 



378 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

or an aurora borealis. Has it given us any thing valuable? In my 
opinion it has left what will more than repay all the money, time, 
and labor expended to make it the brilliant success it was. It has 
given us a moral and patriotic education which will be felt through- 
out the United States down to the next Centennial celebration. 

It has assisted mightily in cultivating that which is most lack- 
ing in American character, namely, reverence. Millions of great 
and little people have been taught to look up toward one of their 
fellow-beings with mingled affection and awe. They have learned 
that he stands out not only the leading American, but the leading 
man of the race. More people now living know his name, and count 
him above every other soldier and ruler, than they do any other 
human being who ever drew a sword or discharged an official func- 
tion. Even to play with his memory is felt to partake of blasphemy, 
and the coarse buffoonery of a few attempts of an occasional jour- 
nal to connect jest with his character and history has been shock- 
ing even to those whose sensibilities are not acute. The whole 
nation seems to love him as much as a man so lofty and dead so 
long can be loved by human hearts. 

Now the question occurs : " What has made this growth of rev- 
erence and love for George Washington ? " It is not any thing 
he has said, or written, or done. He never said so wise and great 
a thing that it has not been surpassed in its wit and wisdom by 
some other speaker. He never wrote what will probably be re- 
membered when the writings of other men have been forgotten. 
He did no wonderfulest thing ; he gained no wonderfulest battle. 
He was not half as " smart " as Aaron Burr, nor had he half the 
genius of Alexander Hamilton, nor was he a hundredth part so great 
a politician as John Adams or Thomas Jefferson. And yet far 
above them all he towers. They are where they were about a hun- 
dred years ago, and he is ten times loftier and more massive in the 
sight of men than he was the day he was inaugurated the first 
President of the United States. Of no merely human being, one 
hundred years after an event in his history, have there ever been as 
many portraits made as have been produced of George Washington 
in the last three months. Of no other mere man have so many 
noble, admiring, inspiring things been said and written as were 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 379 

written and spoken of George Washington in the month of April, 
1889. There is probably no language in which his praise is not 
uttered. 

The question recurs : " What has made this growth of reverence 
and love for George Washington ? " The simple answer is — his 
character, formed on the type and preserved by the principles of the 
Christian religion. His was an age of infidelity. The leading infidel 
nation upon earth was the brightest, and had such influence that 
its tongue was the language of courts and of polite society, and 
that nation was the best friend of America. Voltaire had been 
dead only ten years, and Diderot in France was declaring that be- 
lief in a God was proof of intellectual imbecility. It was at such 
a time, and when distinguished Frenchmen were with his army, 
that at the surrender of the British at Yorktown General Washing- 
ton's orders concluded with the words ; " Divine service shall be 
performed to-morrow in the different brigades and divisions. The 
commander-in-chief recommends that all the troops that are not 
upon duty do assist at it with a serious deportment and that sensi- 
bility of heart which the recollection of the surprising and particular 
interposition of Providence in our favor claims ." 

In his subsequent address to the governors of the different State's 
he made eight distinct references to a superintending Providence. 
These are the last words of that address : " It remains, then, to be 
my final and only request, that your excellency will communicate 
these sentiments to your Legislature at their next meeting, and that 
they may be regarded as the legacy of one who has ardently wished, 
on all occasions, to be useful to his country, and who, even in the 
shade of retirement, will not fail to implore the divine benediction 
upon it. I now make it my earnest prayer that God would have 
you and the State over which you preside in his holy protection ; 
that he would incline the hearts of the citizens to cultivate a spirit 
of subordination ; . . . and finally that he would most graciously be 
pleased to dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy, and to de- 
mean ourselves with that charity, humility, and pacific temper of 
mind which were the characteristics of the divine Author of our 
blessed religion, without an humble imitation of whose example in 
these things we can never hope to be a happy nation." 



33o 



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He accompanied his resignation of his command of the armies of 
the United States by an address in which he says : " I consider it an 
indispensable duty to close this solemn act of my official life by 
commending the interests of our dearest country to the protection of 
Almighty God, and those who have the superintendence of them to 
his holy keeping." 

On the 30th of April, 1789, General Washington became President 
Washington. In his inaugural address he said : " It would be pe- 
culiarly improper to omit in this, my first official act, my fervent 
supplication to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe, 
who presides in the councils of the nations, and whose providential 
aids can supply every human defect," etc. And at the close of the 
address he repaired to the church and publicly worshiped God as the 
King of kings and the Lord of lords. 

This Centennial celebration has given occasion to refresh the 
memory of the nation in regard to that faith which was the cement 
of the great parts of Washington's character, holding them to- 
gether in a massive structure. It is impossible to conceive that 
George Washington could have been as great a man as he was, and 
be wielding such influence as he still does, if he had not been a 
Christian. Let our young men ponder what he would have been if 
his character had been formed on the doctrine of materialism, or of 
positivism, or of so-called humanitarianism. He would now be ab- 
solutely unfelt among the moral forces of the race. If he had ac- 
cepted the teachings offered our young men by Mr. Robert G. 
Ingersoll he might have been a Robespierre ; but what moral influ- 
ence does Robespierre exert this day in which George Washington 
is holding the attention and improving the character not only of 
men but of nations? No; if George Washington be worth any 
thing Ingersollism is contemptibly worthless. If " Bob Ingersoll " 
be true then George Washington is a sham and a lie. Who dares 
assert that? 

Moreover, Washington stands guardian over the interests of his 
country. No President can bravely do what he believes to be right 
without being sustained and comforted by feeling that he has the 
lofty companionship and the sublime approval of George Washing- 
ton. No high official can yield himself to the dictation of cliques, 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 381 

"shysters/' "boodlers," " repeaters," and all the hungry horde of 
men to whom politics is a business, without feeling that all the 
parade and pride of this Centennial, all its multitudes and thunders, 
are folding down upon his conscience the disapproval of the one 
man whose disapproval, next to that of God, men felt to be in his 
day, and still feel to be the deepest damnation that mortals can 
endure this side the awards of eternity. 

These are some of the lessons the Centennial emphasizes. Let 
them be repeated every-where ; so shall the nation grow in virtue, 
and the prayers of George Washington, the Father of his Country, 
shall be answered. 



382 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

RUTH AND I. 



SYMPATHY WITH JOY. 

There is scarcely need of more homily or exhortation teaching us 
sympathy with sorrow and inciting us thereunto. For years and 
years that has been urged upon us ; and all sorts of ways of show- 
ing it have been invented. The very names of scores of benevolent 
institutions keep before our eyes a catalogue of human sorrows. In 
our great cities we are fairly exhausted by the drafts made upon our 
sympathies by the wretchedness of so many of our fellow-men. As 
the head of a large church, which by its name, " Church of the 
Strangers," lays on its pastor not only the care of hundreds of mem- 
bers, many of whom have the sorrows of the poor, and some of 
whom have the miseries of the rich, but also the perplexities and 
sufferings of multitudes of strangers, some days I am so devital- 
ized by the outgoes of my sympathy, that often when the dinner 
hour arrives I have scarcely sufficient strength to whisper a " grace." 

Last week it was flashed upon me that I did not sympathize 
enough with the world's joys. It came thus. I had been rebuking 
myself for not feeling enough, perhaps, for some particular case. 
Such pulls had been made upon my heart that I feared I was becom- 
ing bankrupt of true Christian sympathy. 

So I fled to Ruth. 

You do not know who Ruth is? Well, that does not matter so 
long as I know. The name tells you she is not a man. I laid the 
case before her. And this is the way she held forth on the subject: 

" No ; you do yourself no injustice when you charge yourself with 
lack of sympathy. That is one of your defects of character." 

It was rather hard to hear that from her lips. You see, I was 
sore, and expected a little bit of cooling cream of kindness to be 
laid on my heart. Instead of that Ruth gave me a small slice of 
the judgment-day. 

" Why, Ruth, how can you say that? You know the hours and 
days I spend in relieving when I can, and sympathizing when I can- 
not relieve, the sufferings of so many, so many of whom are so 




■' '- ■r L*. 



RUTH AND 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 383 

ungrateful that for ten years there has never been a slur on me in the 
newspapers or elsewhere which, when traced, has not been found to 
have originated with some who, having had my sympathy and help, 
had turned on me because I could not do more." 

"True, O king," said Ruth, " but your defect is a want of sym- 
pathy with the pleasures and joys of others. You are quick enough 
to detect lurking painfullness in every eye that meets yours, and I 
perceive that you are at once casting about how to succor, but you 
do not care for any one who is happy. Your whole life shows me 
that you are unsympathizing on one whole side of your nature, and 
to one whole class of your fellow-men. So soon as one becomes 
happy you strike him from your book. He is one of your ' dis- 
charged patients.' You must remember the case of Mrs. Hurse, of 
Georgia, one of Dr. Marion Sims's patients. Whenever she was in 
New York, through the long years of her suffering, you were assid- 
uous in your attentions, and from all you said of her, I really thought 
you were fond of her; and yet when you met her upon her recovery 
you were quite cool to her, and she says that you went so far as to 
exclaim, 'O, you were the sick Mrs. Hurse. I took a great interest 
in that'lady,' and left her feeling that as she no longer had claims 
on your sympathy on account of sufferings, she ceased to have any 
claims at all. You recollect that you nearly spoilt your pulpit clothes 
with dust from the plaster of Paris in Dr. Sayre's office while you 
assisted in the treatment of a small boy with a spinal curvature, hold- 
ing him and exerting yourself to interest him while the investiture 
was going on; but perhaps you forget that when the Fanford chil- 
dren had an entertainment and wanted you to join in the fun you 
failed to be present, although you love them so much and they love 
you so much ; and you went elsewhere on the ground that they were 
rich and happy ! Now, does not your whole life show that you have 
not sufficient sympathy with joy?" 

You see, when Ruth talks after that fashion naturally I become 
serious. Ruth is not malignant, and does not triumph over the one 
she has thrown. But her surgical instruments are not idle when 
they should be in use, nor does she ever stop half way in an oper- 
ation. After a pause she proceeded : 

" Moreover, you are a Christian preacher. You have been unduly 



384 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

complimented for the pains you take in reading the sacred Script- 
ures. Bishops, college professors, and others have praised you for 
that. But, as I have heard you in church, I have discovered that 
your reading is very defective, because your heart is in only a por- 
tion of the word. You once said that you had devoted at least four 
hours to the study of the first few verses of the Gospel by St. John, 
in order that you might learn how to read that passage, and were 
still not satisfied with your rendering. But have you ever devoted 
ten minutes to learning how to read the injunction, ' Rejoice with 
them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep ? ' I know you 
have not. The ' weep with them that weep ' you repeat in a way 
that might draw tears from our eyes, but the first part is slurred. 
You know that you do not obey that point of the injunction, and 
so you repeat it like a parrot or an ordinary clergyman of the Estab- 
lished Church of England." 

I think Ruth felt relieved, but I didn't. The last little hit had its 
force in the fact that she had heard me deplore the dreadful manner 
in which the superb ritual of the Church of England is usually ren- 
dered by its clergy. But she led me to search my heart, and the 
result was that I confessed judgment. 

Now, reader, let us have a little friendly chat. In this particular 
are you not as bad as I am ? Are we not both much more sympa- 
thetic with sorrows than with joys, more sorry to hear that our neigh- 
bor's baby is dead than we were glad to hear that it was born, more 
grieved to hear that a dear friend had lost $10,000 than we were glad 
to hear that he had gained $20,000 ? As Christians, are we not more 
dejected by the fall of one church-member than rejoiced by the con- 
version of ten sinners ? 

I put the case that way to Ruth. 

" Yes," said she, " it is a fact. We are all more or less at fault in 
this matter. I hit myself by every blow I aimed at you. And what 
is more, we all increase this faultiness in one another by a trick we 
have of telling our sorrows and concealing our joys, parading our 
losses and hiding our gains. We presume that only the former are 
fit subjects of sympathy. And what a mistake that is ! " 

Perhaps the secret is in that fact. So many letters come to me 
asking me to secure gifts or loans, giving pitiful accounts of oppress- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 385 

ive loads the family are carrying, and reciting harrowing stories of 
suffering. Now, I want to be cultivated on the other side. I want 
1,250 genuine letters telling me of debts paid, mortgages lifted, maid- 
ens married, babes born, suits gained, patients recovered, clouds dis- 
persed, sunlight restored, in fact, every kind of joyful news, that I 
may learn to rejoice with those who rejoice, and have sympathy 
with happiness — 1,250 " hurrah " and " hallelujah " letters, so that I 
may cease being the lop-sided Christian I now appear in the eyes of 
Ruth and, perhaps, also in the eyes of my divine Master. 



"THE WORLD OWES ME A LIVING." 
What Ruth Said to the Tramp. 

If you ever have heard any one make a remark to the effect that 
he is the world's creditor, you might do him a service by reading him 
what Ruth said to a tramp. I report it to you as nearly as I can 
repeat it. Looking at him with her steady and serene eyes she said 
the following, or "words of that tenor: " " How old are you? Are 
you not over twenty ? Can you eat three meals a day and sleep seven 
hours at night? Have you not been able to make your own decent 
living by lawful labor? Then you are not fit to live. The world 
would gain nothing by supporting you. You do not pay for your 
place. If you were buried your carcass would at least enrich a small 
portion of the soil of the planet. For you to live is the world's loss, 
for you to die would be the world's gain. Does that sound severe ? 
Perhaps it does. But it is true, and there is apostolic authority 
for it. 

" You must rid yourself of the idea that you are the world's cred- 
itor. The exact contrary is true. Every man is born the world's 
debtor. Science and religion unite to teach us that. A man comes 
into the world an organism propagated from another organism which 
is one of a series that has been in the world for centuries. His being 
born human starts him in life a debtor to humanity, as his being 
born into the world starts him a debtor to the world. Through 
infancy the debt is increased by every drop of milk he draws from his 
mother's breast and by every breath of air he inhales. Suppose accounts 
are kept. He is charged with all he receives and credited with all 



386 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

he does to improve the world. When he reaches a day in which he 
fairly does for the world what pays for his board, lodging, and clothes, 
he balances the account for that day. Each day in which he does 
more than pay his way, that much 'more' goes toward liquidating 
the account run up against him up to the day he becomes self-sup- 
porting. Let any man make up such an account fairly and then see 
how he stands. 

" If a man has been supported twenty years before making his own 
living, he must afterward support himself and one other person 
twenty years before his account with the world is even square. 
Nothing can go to his credit until he has done more than that. 

" Let us see what ' the world ' has done for us. Before we came 
into it it had built houses and roads, made books, pictures, and stat- 
uary, invented and worked innumerable machines, tested, and rejected 
or retained, forms of civilization, organized communities, and — what 
had it not done? We entered upon all these things, paying nothing 
for them. Each man is bound to leave the estate improved. Each 
man is debtor to the world until he has done this; and he who dies 
without doing this dies a bankrupt ; and it is a generous world if it 
give his remains space for interment. 

" Friend, go in humility and begin to pay your debt to the world 
out of the assets of your youth and brains and muscle." 

Having overheard this harangue, when I met Ruth, I said : " Well, 
you were quite plain and frank in your address to your visitor." 

"What visitor?" asked Ruth, with that very peculiar look in her 
eyes which is so sweetly exasperating. 

"The tramp you spoke to so loudly in the hall this morning." 

Ruth put on her far-away look, as if she were trying to recall some- 
thing. 

" O, I didn't say any thing particularly to the tramp. I had to 
speak loud, because I was addressing a much respected friend who 
was out of sight." 

" Who in the world was that, Ruth ? " 

" A gentleman, a reverend gentleman, who I knew was standing 
at the library door at the head of the stairs, and who could make 
much better use of it than the man whom I saw while I talked, 
although I hope it will help even him." 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 387 

u Now, see here, Ruth, how am I to make any use of your address ? 
You know that I really suffer from a sense of my indebtedness to 
the world and my seeming inability to discharge the debt, and that 
I never forget my obligation to all the thinkers and workers who 
have preceded me to the glorious company of the apostles, to the 
goodly fellowship of the prophets, to the whole army of martyrs, and 
to all others who have beaten plain the paths to heaven for my poor 
feet. How can you apply your harangue to me?" 

" Be just, my friend," said Ruth, " if you will not be generous. Is 
it kind to call my few remarks an ' harangue ? * It is not just to say 
I ' apply ' them to you. I simply suggested that you could ' make 
better use of them ' than the transient visitor." 

"How?" 

" By being just as frank and plain some Sunday in an address to 
the ecclesiastical tramps, loungers, and lazy-bones who belong to 
your church or visit your service every Sunday. You must know, 
there are communicants in the Church who feel all the while that 
they are creditors and the Church debtor ; that the Church owes 
them a comfortable pew in an elegant edifice, with the environment 
of superior music and eloquent preaching. Make them see that they 
are the debtors ; that for holy fathers and saintly mothers, for early 
Christian nurture, for training to holiness, for conviction of sin and 
instruction to salvation, for the means of grace and for the hope of 
glory, they are under a magnificent obligation which can never be 
dissolved, and which can only be partially acknowledged by the devo- 
tion of their lives to the interests of the Church in holy living. What 
is their poor pitiful tithe of money toward paying this debt? If a 
man should give me ten thousand dollars out of love, and I should 
give one thousand of it toward helping some work he had at heart, 
should I consider that he ' owed ' me any thing for that? You may 
depend upon it that people's ideas about creditor and debtor have 
been dislocated, and I want you to ' set ' them." 

Here Ruth ended and I began. 
25 



388 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

"CUI BONO?" 
A Letter to Ruth by the Pastor of the Church of the Strangers. 

Dear RUTH : Last week I was talking with a lady who is vener- 
able in years, gifted in intellect, honored in social life, and influential 
with her pen. Our conversation ran upon certain things she had in 
hand and certain other things in which I was interested. In the 
course of the conversation she frequently drooped her noble head, 
and, looking at the floor, murmured, "Cui bono?" Yes, she mur- 
mured the question rather than propounded it. This she did so 
frequently that at last it arrested my attention and recalled to me 
the fact that I had often used the same phrase. 

Then I began to make a rapid analysis of the old Latin question 
and the motives which ordinarily lead to the asking thereof. It 
would seem to be in the spirit of a respect for practical good sense. 
It would seem to be intended to put a check to the indulgence of 
chimerical schemes and the undertaking of visionary projects. When 
I myself have used it I think it has been with a feeling of a kind of 
superiority to the person to whom the question was propounded. 
He wants to do something. I ask him, "Cui bono?" To what 
good end? What is the use? 

In the course of the conversation alluded to I said to the lady : 
" What is the use of the useful, anyhow ? Must there always be a 
'bonum ? ' Cannot something be done that shall be fair, high, holy, 
godly, without the 'bonum ? ' " She smiled, and the matter dropped 
there. But, coming into my quiet study, the question, its meaning, 
and the motives of the asking, have come to me afresh, and I have 
thought it worth while to pay some little attention to it. 

Have I not often asked the question just to transfer responsibility 
from my shoulders to the shoulders of some energetic person who 
wanted to do something at a moment when my desire was to do 
nothing ? 

Is it really ordinarily asked with the desire of ascertaining if in 
the proposition there be any thing in which / can take part ? Do I 
not rather desire that the man on the other side shall be able to 
prove that in his proposition there is so much good as to bind me 
to co-operation ? And if he cannot easily and clearly do that do I 
not consider myself released ? 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 389 

Then I asked myself the question, What is meant by "good?" 
To that question there might a very great variety of answers. Do 
I really know what ■ the Latin "bonum " and the Anglo-Saxon 
" good " is ? Can I not find out by looking into literature ? Junius 
tells us that in the Codex Argentius "good" is every-where used 
through the Anglo-Saxon in the sense of the Latin "bonum" 
Whence he infers that "goth " is taken from the Greek " agathos." 
Then, again, there are others who take it from the Latin " gaudeo." 
When the Anglo-Saxon " godian " is defined in the old dictionaries 
the Latin equivalents given signify to delight, to profit, to make 
better, etc. But plainly " better " is the comparative of " good." 

Do these not, however, point to the significations ordinarily given 
to the word "good?" One man considers that "good" which 
makes him happier; another man considers that " good " which 
makes him richer in material wealth ; another man considers that 
"good " which enables him to be more useful to his fellow-men. It 
is thus seen that the word may be used to convey the idea of either 
selfishness or unselfishness. So it will come to pass that what shall 
be considered "good " by one man will not be held to be " good " 
by another. 

Moreover, when I ask the question, "Cui bono ? " my hearer may 
turn upon me and say, " What do you mean by that ? Good to you,. 
or good to me ? " But in almost every case the suggestion is that 
the accomplished thing must be really feasible, capable of being 
taken into account, or, as we say, practicable because practical. 

Now all this is very well, and may be very useful if not run into 
the extreme. Our age is growing more and more practical in every 
department of human life and exertion. May we not carry this to 
such an excess as to turn our " good " into " bad " ? our "bonum " 
into "malum " t Are there not some things right to do, and to do 
without regard to consequences — things that ought to be done for 
their own sake ? Things which may seem to stand isolated among 
the causes and effects of society? That they are not so isolated 
every thoughtful man knows. But does it not give us a real thrill 
of enthusiasm and delight when some illogical, uncalculating, free, 
splendid, and superb soul springs before us and does some grand 
thing regardless of consequences, not calculating results, not striving 



390 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

to get any profit for himself or for his fellow-men, but does the good 
thing for the goodness that is in itself? Do not such persons 
and such deeds go far to break in upon the dreariness of the utili- 
tarian spirit, and beget another spirit which will make men do more 
good for others by frequently doing the good thing for the good 
thing's own sweet sake ? 

Dear Ruth, tell me what you think of these things. Yours 
faithfully. 



RUTH ON "EVIL UNSELFISHNESS." 

I was looking over a recent number of the London Spectator, 
which was lying on her table, when Ruth entered the room. 

" Have you seen that article on ' Evil Unselfishness?' " she said. 

I replied that I had just glanced at it, and asked her if she had 
read it. 

" Yes," she replied ; " I took it up because of its title, thinking 
it might present some views which I have held for some time. Fun- 
damentally it does, but it gives illustrations very different from 
those which had occurred to me. To show that there may be evil 
unselfishness it gives an account of the suicide of a Mr. Lowe, who 
arranged a sensational drama and carried it out, the end being his 
self-destruction, whereby he expected to transfer fourteen thousand 
pounds to his family and creditors. Nov/ here was an attempt at 
a colossal robbery, accompanied by the supreme crime of suicide ; 
all the privation and suffering were Mr. Lowe's, and were planned 
by him, to be endured by him, not at all for himself, but for other 
people. If you will run your eye over the article you will see that 
there are several other cases mentioned, some of which are historical. 
Now," added Ruth, " I have thought that sometimes we have been 
very indiscriminate in our praise of unselfishness, and that the mis- 
take was made in supposing that every unselfish act was therefore a 
virtuous act, and that the general disposition of unselfishness is 
saintly, if not angelic. I am quite ready to admit, with you theo- 
logians and other good folk, that self-suppression maybe a very sub- 
lime thing, but I am not ready to admit that it must always be so* 
I believe that it may often be quite otherwise. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 39 1 

" When I was at boarding-school I had occasion to make some 
studies in this department. There were girls that were very un- 
selfish ; there were girls that were very selfish ; and there were girls 
of a neutral tint, so to speak, or, as I should say, with a fair balance 
between self-love and general benevolence. I observed that those 
unselfish girls did no good ; that the selfish girls perpetually im- 
posed upon them in study, in play, in school-room, in bed-room, on 
pleasure-trips. And I noticed that the few girls who were well 
balanced had actually both a more comfortable time for themselves 
and more power of doing good to the rest of the girls. If you had 
time I could tell you quite long stories of all their doings, which 
would illustrate this. And I made up my mind that if ever I be- 
came a teacher — which honor, alas ! never came to me — I should 
take in hand first of all the girls that had a reputation for unselfish- 
ness. From the school I have extended my studies into life on 
this subject. 

" For instance," said she, with that sly glance which she was 
wont to give me when, in the midst of letting her arrows fly wildly, 
she had one little arrow wherewith she desired to pierce me ; " for 
instance, I have known men of your profession to be very unselfish 
in the planning and carrying out of their lives, when, in order to do 
the great work of the ministry, they have suppressed themselves 
and acted very unselfishly. They did right ; for otherwise they 
could not have conducted the church-work which their divine Mas- 
ter had laid to their hand. But I have known other clergymen 
whose praise for unselfishness was in all mouths — especially in the 
mouths of their selfish parishioners, who were perfectly willing to 
see them get a church, and maintain a church, and live on much 
less than their brethren of perhaps less endowments, and do all the 
work of the pulpit, Sunday-school, visitations, and missions, while 
the members of their congregations were allowed to indulge in a 
freedom from the discharge of duty which was actually destructive 
to their spiritual growth. Now this is a case of ' evil unselfishness,' 
It is a case ministers should not imitate and laymen would not. So, 
you see, I think that the object of selfishness must be taken into 
consideration in the estimate. 

" Do you know old Mr. Richards ? " said Ruth. 



392 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



Yes, I knew old Mr. Richards. 

" I have been watching him," said Ruth, " a number of years in his 
relations to his boys. Those young men have been growing up and 
have been taken into business with their father. I understand that the 
income of the business is about enough to support the family in com- 
fortable gentility ; but I finally discovered that those young men had 
three suits of clothes where their father had one. I came to learn 
from a friend who knows their business that the old gentleman de- 
nies himself to indulge his boys; that he does not take the rest and 
recreation necessary for his own continuance in health in order that 
he may set apart what ' Lord John ' Richards needs for a trip to 
the Continent in the summer, what his brother William needs for 
a run to Bermuda or Mexico in the winter, and what will be neces- 
sary to keep Tom Richards in the position of a ' clubable man/ 
Three clever fellows, those young Richardses, and I admit I have 
heard that no young men in town are so loud in their praises of 
their unselfish father as these young gentlemen. And on the poor 
income of their praise Mr. Richards is leading his narrow, unselfish 
life, and is making those young men intensely selfish. There is 
another family I know with whom you are acquainted — the family 
of the Widow Roberts. You know that her income is quite moder- 
ate, and there are no boys in the family to be bread-winners. She 
has two girls who were raised in the New York Hotel while their 
father, who was a banker, was alive. Now, in a very quiet place, 
very far up town, this little family are together, and their poor 
mother does not procure for herself clothes fit to go to church, and 
cuts herself from every comfort and pleasure that Jane and Emily 
may live somewhat near the plane on which they lived while their 
father was with them. I have watched these girls very closely. 
Their 'dear, dear mother' is always on their lips, though I don't 
think she can be much in their hearts. They praise her unselfish- 
ness, and it seems to me that it is only because it feeds their miser- 
able selfishness. If the mother denied herself and refused them — • 
if she brought all three of the family to the same level of living and 
gave the proceeds to some work of benevolence — those two amiable, 
soft-spoken, sweetish girls would shriek with rage. You see there 
is another case in which unselfishnes is injurious to all parties." 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 393 

I was compelled to admit that there was much force in this view 
which Ruth presented with a great deal of earnestness. When I 
reviewed my own life I saw that the unselfishness of others had per- 
haps increased my own selfishness ; that even Ruth, this severe lect- 
urer on morals, had done me no little harm in this direction. I 
began also to think of instances where my own unselfishness had 
actually hurt others. We were both sitting silent while these 
thoughts were going through my mind, and I know not what was 
passing in Ruth's. Then I said : 

"What ought to be done in cases like these? " 

" O, I ought to ask you," said Ruth ; " you are a preacher." 

" Yes, but a preacher must make his sermons out of his hearers 
in order to make them suit his hearers. A physician is allowed at 
least to feel the pulse and look at the tongue of the patient. Are 
you trying to make your life right in this direction ? " 

" Yes," said she, " I really believe I have begun to do that." 

" What is your process ? " I asked. 

" Well, I have gone to the teaching of Jesus, and I am beginning 
to study that. My study has been closer since I have heard this 
modern chatter about 'Altruism,' the loving of others. I have con- 
cluded from the teaching of the Master that there is no true altru- 
ism which is not founded upon true and virtuous egotism, and there 
is no virtuous self-love which is not preceded in the heart by a su- 
preme love of the Lord. Before Jesus says, ' love thy neighbor,' he 
says, Move thyself,' and before saying, '* love thyself,' he says, Move 
the Lord thy God with all thy heart.' " 

" Now, he knows the human constitution. He does not start 
with either selfishness or unselfishness, but starts with the love of 
the Lord, and until that is brought into the heart there is no recti- 
fication of the human character. If old Mr. Richards and old Mrs. 
Roberts loved themselves wisely they would be better able to love 
their children ; but neither Mr. Richards nor Mrs. Roberts nor you 
nor I, my friend, can ever love ourselves or others rightly until first 
of all we love the Lord." 

" My dear Ruth," said I, " what do you say to Leigh Hunt's 
poem of 'Abou Ben Adhem ? ' " 

" O, yes," said she, with a smile that seemed to be brighter on 



394 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



account of her preceding seriousness, " I recollect very well the 
style with which you got those lines off in one of your sermons. 
It seemed to me as if at the close you smacked the lips of your soul 
over it as over a sweet morsel. I could not help seeing how pleased 
you were, too, when one of the students told that the late Dr. 
Frank Hamilton, in one of his lectures at the Medical College, 
applauded that portion of your sermon which contained Hunt's 
verses. I like the conceit of it, and the admirable music of the 
versification. But I am afraid we cannot trust to its implied 
teaching. The implication is that a man may love his fellow-men 
and not love the Lord. If it does mean this I think the teaching 
is injurious." 

Whereupon I ventured this explanation of the poem : When the 
angel said that Abou Ben Adhem's name was not on the list of 
those who loved the Lord it was a sort of celestial fib. The angel 
was simply trying Abou Ben Adhem. The fact was known to the 
world that Abou Ben Adhem did love his fellow-men — that he was 
a devoted philanthropist, in point of fact. He was plainly surprised 
that his name should not be on the roll. When the angel came 
back to his room the next morning and showed Abou Ben Adhem's 
name " leading all the rest" I told Ruth I thought that that really 
fell in with her theory, and went to confirm it : that if a man loved 
his fellow-men it was proof that he did love his Lord. 

" Well," said Ruth, " that may be so ; but I contend that you 
preachers shall let the people know that all self-suppression is not 
necessarily good ; that some self-suppression may be very evil ; that 
all self-love is not selfish, and that it is possible for a human being 
to love himself because of his relations with God; that is to say, 
that he may love himself not for himself, but for the Lord who loved 
him and gave himself for him." 

As I arose, and she helped me put on my overcoat, she said, 
" Well, now we must admit there is a good deal in which end of the 
road a man starts from, and there is a great deal of thinking and 
falling backward, as well as a great deal of thinking and falling 
forward." 

As all our readers may not recall the poem alluded to we repro- 
duce it for comparison : 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. . 395 

" Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase !) 

Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace, 

And saw within the moonlight in his room, 

Making it rich, like a lily in bloom, 

An angel writing in a book of gold ; 

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold ; 

And to the presence in the room he said, 

' What writest thou ? ' The vision raised its head, 

And, with a look made of all sweet accord, 

Answered, ' The names of those who love the Lord.' 

' And is mine one ? ' said Abou. ' Nay, not so,' 

Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low, 

But cheerly still, and said, ' I pray thee, then, 

Write me as one that loves his fellow-men.' 

The angel wrote and vanished. The next night 

He came again, with a great wakening light, 

And showed the names whom love of God had blessed 

And lo ! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest." 



RUTH'S VIEWS OF " REPRESSION." 

A gentleman once, in Ruth's presence, quoted from an American 
statesman who has had a century of reputation for wisdom, as 
saying, " The world is governed too much." It could not have 
been new to her, but there may have been something in the tone 
in which it was said which set her wise head to thinking. It was 
some time before she rejoined the conversation, and then she made 
no allusion to the quotation. 

A few days after Ruth looked up at me and said : " I have been 
thinking about the world being governed too much. It seems to 
me that it affords a fine illustration of how a short sentence may 
contain a very weighty truth or a very heavy falsehood, according 
to the interpretation given it. I should say that in this statement 
every-thing hinged on the phrase ' too much.' It is plain that two 
different minds may attach two different significations to it. One 
man might feel that the saying pointed to the quantity and another 
to the quality of the government ; the one would have less govern- 
ment, the other would have different government. A thinker might 
deny the first and accept the second. I think that would be my 
position. The world could afford to have even more government, 



396 . CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

perhaps, if that government were better. The same is true of a 
nation or a city, a church or a family. 

" I think we might begin at the beginning and look at this state- 
ment as it applies to the training of a child. It is not often that 
any child has too much government; but it is frequently the case 
that a child who has a great deal of government has it administered 
in a very bad and injurious manner. There are parents who raise 
children with the old tyrannical idea which was in the minds of 
mediaeval kings and is still in the minds of modern despots ; namely, 
that all government consists in repression. They have no idea of dis- 
cipline that does not repress, if not punish. One half of the amount 
of nervous energy spent by some mothers in repressing their boys, 
if directed to the wise training of those boys, would insure better 
characters to the children and a more comfortable life to the parents. 

" A parent may form a certain ideal of a boy, just as one would 
draw an outline on the canvas. Now, if her boy happens to be an 
exuberant youngster, and here and there grows out beyond the line 
of her sketch upon the canvas, she will be perpetually striving to 
crowd in the exuberance of his life to her ideal outline. It is easy 
to see that a process like this will be exceedingly irritating to the 
youngster, and he will resent it; and just as a community held in 
certain bounds by the iron arbitrariness of a monarch will become 
so irritated in the course of a few generations as to break out into 
a revolution, so the exuberant boy stands always, apparently, ready 
to begin a domestic revolution. It is not his fault that the trouble 
comes, it is the mistake on the part of the mother; and her mistake 
is, not that she governs her boy too much, but that she does not 
govern him wisely. 

" Calculation must be made for a certain amount of energy, and 
if the person who governs sees that that energy is going in the 
wrong direction no good comes of pushing it back; the wise thing 
to do is to find a new vent for it. A great body of water may be 
drawn off regularly and wisely, so as to run a number of mills for a 
number of years, or it may be repressed in such a way as that by 
its very weight, striving to find vent, it breaks its dams and drowns 
a village. Wherever any natural force makes a demand to be re- 
pressed it seems to me that it should also be drawn off. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



397 



"The mother's business is to find something in the case of her 
boy which will employ his activities so as to give him relief during 
the moments in which he is engaged at it and some satisfaction 
when it is completed. But, you see, this requires some imagination 
in the mother and some care upon her part, also much self-denial 
and patience ; and it is so much easier, for the present, to repress 
than direct that she does the easier thing, laying up in store for 
herself the harder thing in the years that are to come. 

" This everlasting don't, don't, don't, wears down the child. I 
was in a house the other day when this occurred : The woman's 
boy came in and stood up, gazing at me. Her idea was that it was 
not the polite thing for the boy to stand in my presence. She 
'don'ted' him in this way : ' Sit down,' said she ; this being her 
equivalent for ' Don't stand up.' In a lumpish sort of a way he flung 
himself down, a heap of a boy, in the chair. She ' don'ted ' him 
again ; she wanted to say to him, ' Don't sit in that way in the 
presence of this lady ; ' but, not being accustomed to circumlocution, 
for the reason that there was not space enough during the waking 
hours of any day for the innumerable orders which she issued un- 
less put in the tersest way, she called him again. ' Sit up,' she said 
this time. Now, in two seconds there were two acts of repression, 
and as the orders were uttered they sounded very contradictory and 
aggravating : ' sit down,' ' sit up ;' and I could see that, while the boy 
was downing and upping, his nature, inside of him, was growing 
more and more restless, and that by and by there would be a revolt. 

" I knew another mother," continued Ruth ; " a woman of con- 
siderable mind and good education, used to polite society, very 
nervous, and with a very nervous child. Her little boy w r as her 
great object of attention. She had read many novels ; she had an 
ideal gentleman in her mind, and every-where and always her boy 
was to be that gentleman in miniature. Now this was not a bad 
idea ; but her method of attaining it seemed to me calculated to 
lay up sorrow for her in the future. She soon began to consider 
her boy disobedient, to treat him as disobedient, and, what was still 
more harmful, to speak of him in the presence of others as disobe- 
dient. She did not see what others saw — that her very effort to 
bring him to her ideal, being conducted on a basis of repression, 



398 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

was making the boy disobedient. For instance, whenever she told 
him to lay down a spoon, a fork, a napkin, a book, or any thing 
else, she invariably, before the child had time to obey, put out her 
hand to put the book, the spoon, or what not, where she wanted it 
to be placed. The natural reasoning of the boy was that he was 
never to do any of the things commanded unless a hand was laid 
upon him. The result naturally would be, although she did not see 
it, that he would perpetually resist ; that this resistance, although it 
was not a battle and could hardly be called a skirmish, because it 
would occur sometimes half a hundred times a day, nevertheless 
was a conflict of will, and, however slight, a conflict involves oppo- 
sition. And my lovely friend did not see that she was training her 
boy to do nothing that he was not absolutely made to do by phys- 
ical force." 



RUTH'S DEFENSE OF WORRY. 
Concerning Different Methods of Disquietude. 

To Ruth's dainty boudoir I have access only at certain hours of 
the day. On one occasion I found her sitting at her desk pondering 
a letter which she held in her hand. She was evidently studying a 
reply to the epistle when I entered. To my question, " What is on 
your mind now?" she replied very nearly as follows: 

" I seem to be set to emphasize some of your teachings which are 
too feebly expressed and to modify others which are put very strongly. 
Here is a letter from one of your parishioners, who is worrying her- 
self over that statement of yours that ' It is not work which kills, 
but worry,' when you were striving to set forth worrying as a sin. 
Good Mrs. Stapleton writes me as one who feels that she has com- 
mitted a mortal sin and is in danger of everlasting damnation. She is 
now worrying because she worries ; and if that were pointed out to 
her as a fault she would worry because she had worried over wor- 
rying. Now, to tell you the plain truth, perhaps I am all wrong ; but 
I am getting tired of this sort of thing, and I have been thinking of 
preparing a Defense of Worry." 

" Well, dear Ruth," said I, " most surely, if you do, it will not be 
in self-defense, for I have never seen you worry in all my life. I 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 399. 

confess to a little curiosity to know the line of your defense. Sup- 
pose, now, you just talk aloud the kind of letter you would write 
to Mrs. Stapleton, and I will strive to remember it. In that way, 
perhaps, good will be done me, and you will hear how the thing- 
sounds before you commit it to writing." 

" Well," said Ruth, " here it is : " 

" My Dear Mrs. Stapleton : The old adage is, Give a dog a bad 
name and every body hits him. Some high and mighty moralist, 
himself with a thin skin and a long memory, was disturbed one day 
by somebody's worrying — it may have been a man, it may have been 
a woman — but he launched an ethical arrow against worrying which 
has been shot into and pulled out of more '.ore hearts than you and 
I can count. Now, I believe in worrying ! I never knew a man or 
woman of any account who did not worry." 

Here I interrupted Ruth and said : " That's not true, Ruth, or 
else you do not know yourself; for you are a treasure of a woman 
and you never worry." 

" I shall give up this thing," said Ruth, quietly and pleasantly, " if 
I am to have impertinent interruptions. I am not going for logic 
now : I simply want to right something that seems to me to be 
wrong ; so I resume. I should go on to say to Mrs. Stapleton that 
worry may be undue exhibition of excitement over one's environ- 
ment, and that it is not to be held up as the highest virtue known 
among men or angels ; but, nevertheless, there are some things so 
much worse that worrying, in the comparison, may seem to be tol- 
erably good. There are circumstances in which not to worry argues 
such apathetic indifference, such ethical obtuseness, such unconquer- 
able stupidity, that the person who does not worry may well be con- 
sidered an individual of no account. I should then set forth to Mrs. 
Stapleton, who is a wife, a mother, and a housekeeper, that, if I had 
to choose between her and Mrs. Jellyby, I should select her in pref- 
erence ; and I believe that our Lord would indorse the choice. Mrs. 
Jellyby did not worry ; she went on, calmly and serenely, making her 
flannel shirts for the naked savages in tropic heats without the slightest 
worry over the dreadful condition of the household : over Peepy's 
tumbling down stairs, and being generally in such a condition that 
one could not distinguish his bruises from his dirt ; over the needs 



40O 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



of her husband, whom she was driving to bankruptcy ; over the de- 
mands of her house, in which Peepy was building houses from oyster- 
shells in the hall. All these she rolled upon her poor little daughter, 
and Caddy had the worry; and Caddy was worth a half-dozen of her 
mother. Don't hold up to me as a Christian example any woman 
who does not worry when things she is responsible for are going 
wrong. I see plainly that 'tis better to be systematic and orderly 
and provident, so that things may not go helter-skelter ; but when 
they are going helter-skelter where are the brains and where is the 
heart of the housewife who does not worry ? 

" So I should point out to Mrs. Stapleton that wherever any one 
is an overseer, wherever any one has accountability to others, where 
any one has dependent upon him any thing for which he must give 
an account, where, for instance, a capitalist puts his money into a bus- 
iness and leaves it in the hands of a young man, and every thing of 
success in the business is expected of that young man, and those 
who are under him throw things into sixes and sevens, it is but 
a natural expression of that young man's anxiety that he should 
worry. 

" I should further set before your parishioner that in the case even 
of a pastor, a holy man, a man ministering in holy things, I should 
have great compassion for him if he worried ; " and here Ruth gave 
me a significant glance. " The fact is," she continued, " I should 
not care much to be the parishioner of a pastor who was so ineffably 
amiable, so sugarly sweet, so transcendently self-controlling, that 
when every thing was going awry in Sunday-school, choir, financial 
department, and spiritual administration, by reason of the wrong- 
doing- of church officers and church members, he did not now and 
then give some expression to the concern which he felt. 

"The fact seems to be, I should point out," continued Ruth, who 
was never steadier in tones than when she was all aglow, " that there 
are different modes of being disquieted. Some are internal, some 
are external. Ordinarily it would seem that people apply worry to 
that which comes out on the surface and affects other people. For 
instance, you have reminded me to-day that I do not worry. Per- 
haps it is true that I have a certain temperament which prevents me 
from expressing the state of my heart so as to annoy you and others ; 



FOR E VER Y FIRESIDE. 40 1 

but there are some people who cannot so control themselves as to 
keep this expression back. Then we say of them that they are 
1 worrying ' — then we blame ' worry.' And I begin to think that in most 
cases our blame of 'worry ' in others is due to our own self-conscious- 
ness. We do not long to hear of the trouble of others. At any 
rate, I shall try to soothe dear Mrs. Stapleton the best I can ; but 
I shall not increase her anxiety by denouncing 'worrying.' 

M I am told that an eminent French surgeon always advises his 
patients, when undergoing an operation without the use of anaes- 
thetics, to cry and scream and bawl as much and as loud as they can, 
but by no means to try to repress their feelings. This sensible man 
knows that it is with trouble as it is with some diseases, such as 
measles, of which the very best treatment is to bring the thing to 
the surface, and the very worst thing to drive it in. Now, the gen- 
eral plan is to drive worry in, and I am going to try, in the case of 
this one patient, the good effect of striving to drive it to the surface 
and encourage her in that course. I shall administer warm tea." 

I have not seen Mrs. Stapleton since Ruth's letter, and so I can- 
not state the condition of my parishioner. When I learn the effect 
of Dr. Ruth's medicine I will report. In the meantime I shall not 
worry over any thing Ruth says or does. 



RUTH ON A GOOD OLD AGE. 

" To youth age looks far off and to be moving slowly. Never- 
theless, youth soon finds itself moving quite rapidly toward old age. 
Then temperament has much to do with the views which the young 
take of old age. Those views are merely imaginative and speculative, 
but old age itself is a reality. What we shall be in our old age has 
no effect upon what we are now, but what we are being and doing 
now will have a very great effect upon our old age. 

" The phrase ' a good old age ' is very euphonious. It may be 
uttered rather patronizingly or it may be uttered very appreciatively. 
We know what old age is ; now, what is a ' good old age ? ' To an- 
swer that one has to settle one's meaning of good. There may be 
a very good thing which is not a very bright, a very prosperous, or 
a very much desired thing. A thing may be very good toward this 



4 o2 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

world and very bad toward the next world ; a thing may seem to 
be very good for the body which is not pleasant to the soul, and 
another thing good for the spirit which is not agreeable to the 
flesh;' 

The above are the observations of Ruth when she heard that I 
was called to attend the funeral of an old lady ninety-nine years of 
age — a lady with whom neither of us had the slightest acquaintance, 
and of whom we did not know whether she had been a sinner or a 
saint. 

"Ninety-nine years! Why, that is a good old age, is it not?" 
said Ruth. 

" That depends," said I, " upon what you consider to be a good 
old age." 

That started Ruth into what is written above. When she had 
finished her little " lamentation," as I teased her by calling her dis- 
sertation, I said, " Now, Ruth, just sit down there and paint me a 
picture of a good old age." 

" To paint a picture," said Ruth, looking up at a painting on the 
wall, and making with the index-finger of her right hand invisible 
sketches upon the third finger of her left hand as her wont is when 
she is thinking aloud, "to paint a picture one must have a model 
visible to the naked eye or visible to the eye of the soul. Now, I 
am very sorry to say that it is far easier for me to paint a picture of 
a bad old age than of the other kind, because I happen to know a 
number of people who have been * spared,' as they call it, to their 
own harm. Certainly no old age is good that has a bad youth and 
a bad life behind it and a dark passage out of this life before it. 
Nothing seems to me possible to make that a good old age. I know 
some persons who are just that and no more, although they have 
wealth and surroundings which the world ordinarily thinks ought to 
make a person happy. Now, there is old Mr. Keltus ; he is eighty- 
nine years old, and he wants to live eleven more years so as not to 
die below par! His house on the avenue is admirable, his equipage 
is superb, and yet I am sure that that man is in a bad old age. At 
eighty-nine he is as unweaned from the things of this life as any 
young man in the full flush of its pleasures, and yet such is the 
effect of years upon him that he cannot pursue his pleasures — he 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 403 

cannot execute his plans. With all that fine equipage how seldom 
he can go in the park ! He has made a will, and he is so free that 
he tells of its provisions. He is going to establish a great and 
greatly-needed institution in this city, and is going to endow it 
munificently. He tells this to every body, and is apparently living 
on advance payment of praise for what may really not be accom- 
plished ; the will is sure to be contested. The old man is doing 
no goad now because he thinks he will lump his beneficence into 
what he is going to do when he is dead and gone. 

" There, too, is old Mrs. Butterton. How wonderfully her figure 
is preserved ! When she is put in trim and set up in a room or walks 
across her parlor it is a beautiful, trig little figure, and she is plainly 
proud of it. There is her magnificent mansion, in which she can 
occupy only a corner, and there is her great picture-gallery, any one 
of whose paintings would endow a hospital. She has built a great 
church away from her own home ; but she has no comfort of public 
worship, and ministers of the Gospel abstain from calling upon her 
because many of your brethren are weak, and are afraid to pay 
proper attention to the rich lest they be called toadies. She is no 
more free than the poor mouse whom the cat has so subdued that 
it can only move two or three inches in front of the cat's paw and 
has not strength enough to run away, nor even to run into the hole, 
but feels that the moment it ventures beyond a certain spot the cat's 
paw will be down upon it. Now, that is the life she is living. A 
sharp, long-headed, calculating man has her perfectly in his control, 
and when she drew up a statement called her 'will and testament' 
it was his will and testament. I cannot call that a good old age; 
can you ? " 

I assented. I thought I could not. 

" There is our friend the bishop," said Ruth. " He has spent his 
life in the service of God. The moneys that have been given him 
he has expended upon charities, never doing it ostentatiously, but 
every now and then being discovered. In his old age his wife, sweet 
woman, is almost bed-ridden, his son is a drunkard, and that family 
is broken up. I can hardly call that a good old age." 

Then I interposed and said to Ruth that I could not stand this 

gloomy painting any longer ; give me something brighter. 
26 



4 04 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

"Well," said she, "there is old Mr. Jenkins, on that farm of his. 
He is eighty years old ; his wife is nearly as old. They have been 
married over half a century. They have just enough to meet their 
wants from day to day. Their children are settled near them, hon- 
est working-people. All are communicants in the congregation wor- 
shiping in that little church into which Mr. Jenkins can go in the 
foulest weather — his garden backing upon the grave-yard. He is 
healthy, contented, with blessed memories, for he has always been 
a man giving great help by his wisdom and comforting others in 
many ways. He is every body's father, if he is not every body's 
grandfather. It is a means of grace to hear him talk of his hope of 
glory, and whoever goes near his house feels that if the church be a 
sacred place the Holy Spirit has sanctified the vicinity and poured 
its consecration also on Jenkins's home. He is willing to live, he 
is ready to die. Christ is his life, death is his gain. And that dear, 
sweet, ripe woman that walks along with him, is she not in a good 
old age ? They have the burdens which the years have laid upon 
their shoulders, but they have the everlasting arms of God beneath 
them. 

" Now," said Ruth, " I call that a good old age. It presents the 
aspect of the human life merging into the life everlasting. There ! 
That is my ideal as far as I can realize it." 

" Yes," I said, " That is an old age and good. The days that are 
numbered when the heart is not applied unto wisdom are not good. 
I wish we could contrive some way of making our young people feel 
that old age is the garnering of that harvest of middle life which is 
the product of the seed-sowing of youth." 

And then the seance broke up. 



RUTH AND DR. PHIPPS. 

" Well," said Ruth, " I have to pay for being a quiet, modest, 
unobtrusive sister." 

" How is that?" I inquired. 

" Just this way. Old Dr. Phipps has been here and has delivered 
himself of his views of Paul and the woman question ; and this he 
has done by the space of an hour. Why / should have to hear such 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 405 

a lecture I am at a loss to know ; and I relieved myself by occupy- 
ing a portion of the time in seeking a solution of that question. 
Was it because the good old man suspected me of having an inclina- 
tion toward public speaking? But he had no ground for such sus^ 
picion. I have never spoken in an assembly in my life, unless you 
consider taking part in general conversation in a large company as 
coming under that head. A few times I have conferred with ladies 
on church matters or charities, but there was no man present. No, 
the old doctor could not have taken that ground. Was it because 
he was so far from the suspicion as to feel that, perhaps, I was the 
one woman in the parish to whom it was entirely safe to pour out 
his grievances? I think it must have been that." 

She paused, and looked as if she were still working out that 
problem. 

" W r ell, you gave him as good as he sent ? " 

" No, I didn't. I sought to find out what had started him afresh 
on this theme. Then I drew him out and questioned myself why 
we should not agree with his interpretation of Paul." 

" And why with Paul ? " I asked. 

" You know that it is not fair to ask me such a question. My posi- 
tion on that subject you know, if any man knows. You know that 
I have always felt and said that there was no middle ground; that 
the Bible is to be accepted wholly or rejected wholly. If not rejected 
it must be regarded as having paramount authority. Having so 
accepted it all we have to do is to ascertain its meaning, and, in 
regard to any precept, to learn whether it be of local or of universal 
application ; if plainly of local application, then to ascertain whether 
it may not contain a principle which we must adopt and apply to 
our times and our circumstances. That's our canon ; don't you, 
think it is a pretty sensible one — for a woman ? " 

There was no reason why I should not acknowledge that I did. 
But I urged Ruth to give me a sketch of the run of her thoughts 
while Dr. Phipps was holding forth. 

" Well," said she — Ruth's " well " seemed to be a little arrange- 
ment which combined the drawing in a good breath with a sort of 
mental girding, steadying her for a run down the " talk " she was 
about to deliver — " well, the dear old gentleman began by asking 



40 6 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

me if I had a Bible. Of course I had. It was an odd question. 
If he had followed it by the other question, ■ Then why don't you 
read it more and better?' I might have thought it rude, but it 
would have gone to the quick of my conscience. He didn't, how- 
ever. He seemed to wish to be able to put his finger on the very 
place and to have the inspiration of seeing the very words. There 
they were, in the fourteenth chapter of First Corinthians : ■ Let your 
women keep silence in the churches; for it is not permitted unto 
them to speak. ... If they will learn anything, let them ask their 
husbands at home.' " 

Ruth paused a moment and then resumed. " I think it must have 
been Mrs. Tope's earnest talk at last night's prayer-meeting which 
set him going, and he went around and around, like a humming-top, 
and never got far from one spot." 

" But that suggests that sometimes he did move a little." 

" Well, I must say that sometimes he did." 

11 Now, confess, dear Ruth ; was it not you who moved him by 
your sly little questions ? " 

Ruth smiled. I wish you could see her smile when she perceives 
that her guileless cunning has been detected. " Well, all I did was 
to inject a few interrogatories, if my small questionings will bear so 
grand a name." 

" Give me a few specimens, please." 

" For instance, I suggested that a letter, with all its parts, could 
be better understood if we knew the writer and the person addressed. 
Now, we all know Paul as much as we know any man whom we 
have not seen ; but who were these Corinthians? Dr. Phipps didn't 
seem to have devoted much study to the state of society in Corinth 
ih apostolic days. I owned that the question had been outside my 
womanly sphere, so that I had never examined a book on the subject ; 
but I had heard that there was great corruption of morals and 
manners in Corinth, and, if that was so, it was most apostolically 
proper that Paul should warn the young Christian Churches against 
,any thing that would bring the new faith into disrepute. I sug- 
gested also that I had gathered, from reading Paul's letters to the 
Corinthians, that even the Christians in that city were a very exceed- 
ingly difficult crowd to bring to decency of behavior. Why, even 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 407 

the solemnities of the Lord's Supper couldn't awe them. They 
fasted so as to come to the feast with ravenous appetites, and then 
they crowded and pushed one another at the table, after the fash- 
ion of American travelers when the train stops ' ten minutes for 
refreshments,' to see which could get the most bread and wine and 
get it quickest. And some closed the feast under the table, ' drunken. 1 
I called Dr. Phipps's attention to what Paul said of the men, that I 
might draw him awhile from what was said of the women of 
Corinth. Then, with a disciple's ingenuous love of learning, I sug- 
gested whether the word your in the text were not the emphatic 
word. If so, it might mean that in so rude and undisciplined a 
Church as that at Corinth any one could see that when the men 
were in a scuffle at the Lord's table, it would only add to the con- 
fusion of the scene if the women began to give the Church pieces 
of their minds." 

" Perhaps the doctor had observed that Paul had given no such 
explicit direction to any other Church." 

" O, but he was ready for me, and turned over the pages of my 
own copy of the Bible to 1 Timothy, second chapter and eleventh 
verse: ' Let the women learn in silence with all subjection. But I 
suffer not a woman to teach nor usurp authority over the man, but 
to be in silence.' Then the dear old gentleman followed it up 
by reading me Ephesians iii, 24. He was in dead earnest ; and it 
seemed so strange to me that an old man who was sweet as a nut 
to the core of his heart, and had a chivalrous devotion to women 
of all ages and ranks, should be so set against their taking part in 
public religious service." 

" Perhaps he loves the word of the Lord more than he loves 
women even, and regards the New Testament as the word of the 
Lord," was my interruption. 

"Well, it didn't provoke me a mite," continued Ruth, "If he 
had shown a spirit of tyranny, as though he loved to oppress the 
weak, I confess I should have taken it, perhaps, in a different spirit. 
As it was, the teasing spirit came upon me, and I asked the Doctor 
whether the record in Corinthians did not show some things more 
creditable to the women of Corinth than Paul's account of the scenes 
at the eucharistic feasts did to the men. He wanted to know what 



4 08 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

they could be. O, I was not dogmatizing. I was only asking for 
information ! He was willing, quite willing to impart it. 

"Then," continued Ruth, " 1 ventured to suggest that some of 
those women must have spoken out in meeting, which seemed 
to intimate that at least they were not stupid, and also that they 
had had the humility to confess ignorance, just like the men who 
were in it, by entering into a discussion which had stimulated their 
minds. He would allow me to say a few words in behalf of mem- 
bers of my own sex, although they did live so far off and so long 
ago ! That was said to soothe the doctor." 

"Was he soothed?" I asked. 

" Only partially," replied Ruth. " Then I thought I would push 
him a little. So I said, ' Dear doctor, the passage also seems to me 
to imply two things about the men ; namely, that the husbands of the 
women were present at divine service, and that those husbands who 
used to get drunk at the Lord's Supper were capable of instructing 
their wives at home. But in these later days there are three phe- 
nomena for which Paul did not seem to provide. One is that, 
throughout the world, at public religious worship generally the 
women are in a large majority, as they are said to outnumber the 
men vastly, even in heaven and in Massachusetts; another, that a 
great many women have no husbands at all ; and a third, that the 
men who do attend service are so busy that they cannot pay atten- 
tion to such subjects, and if they did are not enough at home for the 
wives to sit at their dear and revered feet to be taught in sacred things.' 
This seemed to startle him, so I followed it up: 'What's to become 
of the widows? What's to become of the spinsters? And so many 
Christian wives cannot induce their husbands to go to church. I'd 
like to know what prospect of religious instruction Mrs. Zebedee 
had at home, when Mr. Zebedee doesn't seem ever to have been 
present at the Master's discourses. By the way, doctor, do you 
think that we should ever have heard of Mr. Zebedee if it hadn't 
been for his Christian wife ? And don't you think it might have 
been well for Mr. Zebedee to " ask his wife at home " and to " learn 
in silence?" Indeed, when I become anxious about his case my 
only relief is in the trust that the poor man did so. Poor Mr. 
Zebedee!'" 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 409 

Ruth, do you know that you were nearly wicked ? And I can 
see that demure look of innocence on your face while you were 
prodding that good old man," said I. 

" Prodding ! " exclaimed Ruth. " Why, no ; I was gently lead- 
ing the dear old soul around to look at the question on the other 
side." 

" Well, how did you end matters?" 

** We didn't end them at all. As a compromise I suggested that 
in this age of the world, and in this western part of the world, per- 
haps we could carry out Paul's spirit and reach the end Paul wished, 
if, outside of public worship, we had a place which all the church 
members would consider a Christian ' home,' and that on set occa- 
sions all the married people came together, when each wife should 
ask her own husband for a practical application of last Sunday's 
sermons,- and all the other husbands and wives be permitted to listen 
as each spoke in his turn ; and that Christian bachelors and spin- 
sters be allowed to be present so as to learn how to be edifying when 
they had changed their relations. The services might be varied by 
an occasional hymn and prayer and passage from the word. The 
doctor broke in with exclamation, ' Why, that would be tantamount 
to a prayer-meeting ! ' 'It is open to that objection,' I replied, ' but ' 
— Just then there came a messenger calling the doctor in great haste 
to see Mrs. Tope's child, who had the croup. And so the woman 
question was adjourned." 



4IO CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



READINGS FOR SUNDAY AFTERNOON. 



DAVID. 

The discipline to which God subjects a human spirit has two 
objects; the first is its own culture, the second is its adaptation to 
the cultivation of others. These statements are illustrated by the 
history of David. 

In the small city of Bethlehem, nearly eleven hundred years 
before the coming of our Lord, there resided a plain man of mod- 
erate substance, whose business is reported to have been that of a 
weaver of the veils of the sanctuary. 

His name was Jesse ; his wife's name is not known. Their 
family consisted of seven sons and two young women, probably 
daughters of Jesse's wife by a former husband. Into this domestic 
group a babe was born, B. C. 1088. They called him David, which 
means darling. His very appearance was remarkable. He had fair 
skin, rosy cheeks, and probably red or blonde hair and blue eyes. 
His blood was not purely Jewish. The Moabitess Ruth was his 
ancestress. As a rule the greatest men do not have " blue blood." 
There is in them a mingling of nationalities. 

This child was to have almost all the experiences possible to man, 
and to exert an influence which was to reach and modify all subse- 
quent States, religions, literatures, and civilizations. To-day there 
are no people among whom his name is not known and no land 
where his influence is not felt. 

His brothers were older than himself, and between them and him 
little familiarity existed. His associates were the sons of Abigail 
and Zeruiah, his half-sisters. His first employment was the 
feeding of his father's flocks. This simple pastoral life gave him 
physical vigor and promoted his soul-growth ; but this was not 
always a quiet life. In defense of his sheep he had occasional con- 
flicts with wild beasts, and sometimes, perhaps, with neighboring 
Philistine marauders. In these encounters he showed such prowess 
that his fame reached the court of the reigning king. That king 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 4 U 

was Saul, the first of the monarchs of Israel, of whom David was 
to become the rival and successor. 

When David was twenty-one years of age, one day, as the cus- 
tom was, probably at the first new moon of the year, a sacrificial 
feast was held at Bethlehem, and David's father, Jesse, presided. 
The greatest man at that time known was Samuel, the prophet. 
The Bethlehem worshipers were startled in the midst of their 
sacrifice by the incoming of the great prophet, driving a heifer and 
carrying a horn of consecrated oil. The frightened elders made 
haste to learn that he had come on a peaceful errand. Under God's 
direction he was to anoint the future king of Israel. All the sons 
of Jesse, except the youngest, were made to pass before the 
prophet ; but the divine restraint prevented their consecration. 
David was sent for. He came in from the sheep-fold, full of celerity, 
strength, and grace, and on the young shepherd's head fell down 
the drops of God's consecrating oil. 

When God has work for a man to do that man need not hurry, 
but he must be ready. David's time soon came. King Saul was 
engaged in conflict with the Philistines in the frontier hills of 
Judah. The armies were separated by the water-course of Elah. 
The Israelites were poorly armed, because the Philistines had 
allowed no blacksmith among them. Only king Saul had a com- 
plete suit of armor. Daily from the Philistine camp stalked a 
champion of huge proportions, with all necessary defensive and 
offensive armor. Day by day he defied the army of Israel, but 
every man was afraid to meet this giant of Gath. One day David's 
father sent him to his brothers in the camp. Those elder brothers 
chided him, as if he had allowed his love of excitement to draw 
him from his work and push him into danger. Notwithstanding 
the rebuffs he had met in the camp the impetuous young shepherd 
was introduced to the king and undertook the combat. With five 
polished pebbles, picked from the bed of the stream, and his simple 
shepherd's sling, he killed Goliath, and brought victory to his own 
people. 

After this conflict he probably spent his time between his father's 
flocks and the school of the prophets, where his genius for poetry 
and music must have made him a favorite. This musical talent 



412 



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was soon called into requisition. From something which had 
occurred when David had visited the camp, or from his general 
reputation, he was known to the courtiers of King Saul as having 
unusual musical talents. The king's life had been bad, and he was 
suffering from terrible depression of spirits. At the suggestion of 
his attendants Saul sent for David, who, when the evil spirit was 
upon the king, took a harp and played so that Saul was refreshed 
and well, and the evil spirit departed from him. But the popular 
greetings which David received when he returned from the 
slaughter of Goliath sowed the seeds of jealousy in the mind of 
Saul. Although he had become the king's son-in-law, and the 
king's son Jonathan was his bosom friend, he suffered so much from 
the snares laid for him by the royal jealousy that he escaped from 
the court and fled to Samuel. 

It really did seem at this time to be a problem whether David 
should devote himself to public life or to the prophetical office. It 
might have been the latter but for the ferocity with which Saul pur- 
sued him. This drove him into the life of an independent outlaw. 
For the space of six years David had various fortunes, but his fol- 
lowers increased in numbers until he had an organized force of six 
hundred men, among whom were some who had come from the 
forces of Saul. With these he had been settled more than a year 
at Ziklag, on the border of Philistia, when the battle of Gilboa 
occurred, in which the three sons of Saul were slain and the king 
perished by his own hand. Then David ascended the throne. 

As King of Judah he reigned at Hebron more than seven years. 
For about five years the house of Saul maintained some show of 
rule at Mahanaim, so that David's position during that time was 
simply that of a tribal chief. But his power gradually increased. 
A quarrel between Ishbosheth, Saul's son, and his general, Abner, 
caused the latter to bring Israel over to David. This gave him the 
presence and help of the priesthood. 

Then began David's reign of thirty-three years over all Israel. 
This third of a century was one of the most important in all human 
history. It gave the Hebrew people a national monarchy, an estab- 
lished Church, a splendid ritual, and the noblest sacred literature 
the world has ever produced. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 413 

David determined to move his capital to a more nearly central 
place than Hebron. His quick, sagacious eye saw that Jebus was 
the spot. Its existence for nearly three thousand years has justified 
his choice. By a sudden assault it was captured. There David 
built his palace and set his throne. Thither he brought the 
tabernacle of the Lord, so that on one hill might be the residence 
of the invisible, eternal King, and his visible representative — the 
monarch David. He was no longer an Arab Sheikh ; he was the 
founder of an empire. He brought the whole land under him. He 
perfected a powerful military organization ; he laid deep and strong 
the foundations of an established Church ; he ordered its ritual, 
developed its music, and so enriched its psalmody that, east and 
west, his hymns are sung in every tongue, and his ritual modifies all 
forms of public worship. He conceived the idea of a temple to 
God such as the sun had never shone upon. He suggested what- 
ever is ample, rich, sublime, and solemn in temple or basilica, in 
mosque or cathedral. He lived to the age of seventy. He became 
father to the most splendid and revered monarch who ever sat upon 
a throne, and died, leaving to that son a kingdom the foes of 
which had been conquered and the prosperity of which had been 
insured. 

The Bible history of this extraordinary man exhibits the honesty 
of the sacred narrative. He rides the heavens of history like a 
sun — a sun whose spots are not concealed. He had so many 
splendid qualities of intellect, so many generosities of heart, so 
many noblenesses of character, and so many charms of manner, 
that a human biographer would be pardoned for omitting statements 
of those acts which stained his career. With all his prudence and 
piety it is told that the man after God's own heart was impetuous 
and passionate. Those very qualities which, under restraint, made 
him magnificent, rendered him wretched when they were uncon- 
trolled. But he was so ready to forgive all who sinned against 
him, so penitent whenever he sinned, so ready to make confession 
and reparation, that he will live in the hearts of men so long as the 
union of strength with gentleness, vigor with grace, humility with 
chivalry, and intellect with religion, excite the admiration and win 
the affections of mankind. 



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A man can give the world only what he has, and all that a man 
has he must get by experience. The world will always have in it 
struggle and success and failure ; the wolf of poverty and the 
sirens of wealth ; sin, sorrow, penitence, contrition, faith, hope, 
charity, and all earth gives, and heaven offers, and hell threatens to 
our human nature. The prayers and rejoicings of mankind must 
go to God in song. One singer must be raised who shall set the 
sorrows and the shouts of humanity to music. He cannot sing for 
the sorrowful who hath not himself suffered. He cannot sing for 
the shouting who hath not himself succeeded. 

In David God raised up a man in whose physique perfection 
came from mingled blood of Gentile and of Jew — a man in whom 
the marriage of practical sagacity with the poetical faculty pro- 
duced the noblest offspring of the intellect ; a man who received for 
the enriching of his nature all out-door influences shooting up from 
landscape and raining down from sky ; a man made tender by care 
for gentle domestic animals and courageous by encounters with 
wild beasts ; a man who was courted and hunted down — the 
darling of his friends and the terror of his enemies ; a man who 
excited among men and women every friendly and every sinister 
passion and experienced their action upon himself; a man against 
whom crimes were committed and who committed crimes against 
others ; a man who had been peasant, courtier, exile, warrior, prophet, 
statesman, poet, prince, king, emperor ; a man who knew what it was 
to have one son die in infancy and another in rebellion against him, 
and a third who should fill the world with the glory of his fame ; 
a man who should stand in the fullness of his power, having had 
experience of every private and every public station, every private 
and every public joy, every private and every public sorrow. 

It is as if the all-wise God had constructed in one human being 
an organ with all the keys and stops possible to humanity, and as 
if the Holy Ghost had on that organ with those keys and stops 
played every tune of every song that all humanity may need to sing 
in life or death, or carry in memory from earth to heaven. 

Such David was in the city of the great King on earth ; what 
must he be in the city of the new Jerusalem and in the temple not 
made with hands, eternal in the heavens ! 



FOR EVERY El RESIDE. 



PAUL. 



415 



There have been men who might be called " hinge-men ;" that is 
to say, men on whom the valves of the doors of the ages have 
swung. Perhaps there have been only seven of these, but of them 
Paul of Tarsus was one of the strongest and most remarkable. 

Such men do not come by chance. The Divine Providence who 
is to use them arranges the circumstances which are to produce 
them. It is instructive to study the precedent connections of such 
a man as Paul. 

There were three great civilizations with which he was to come 
in contact, and which he was to influence energetically; namely, the 
Hebrew civilization of revealed religion, the Greek civilization of 
intellectual culture, and the Roman civilization of political power. 
He was born in the city of Tarsus, when Jesus, born in Bethlehem, 
was about eight years of age. Tarsus was no mean city. It had 
an old history, exerted great influence, was the seat of a Roman 
governor, and, at the time when Paul was born, if we may credit 
Strabo, it was even more illustrious than Athens and Alexandria in 
all that relates to philosophy and modern education. Paul's origi- 
nal name was Saul, a Hebrew word meaning " asked for." His 
parents, then, were Jews, but the family had become free Roman 
citizens probably on account of some service to the State the 
nature of which is not recorded. 

It will be seen how three elements of culture met in this remark- 
able person to fit him for his remarkable work. He must have 
very early become acquainted with Greek literature, and with his 
powerful intellect have absorbed very much of Greek culture ; he 
must have been trained to the discharge of the duties of Roman 
citizenship, of which through every period of his life he availed 
himself; and, as he was destined to a high place in the Jewish 
Church, he was early taught in the sacred writings of his ancestors, 
In addition to these he early acquired a trade, to which handicraft 
he was indebted in later years for much of his support. The Jews 
held the excellent maxim that " he who does not teach his son a 
trade teaches him to steal." To fit him to become a doctor of law 
he was subsequently placed under the tuition of Gamaliel, one of 



4 i 6 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

the seven teachers to whom the title of Rabbon was given. Such 
was his social and intellectual preparation for life. 

So great was his intellect that the probability is that he became a 
member of the Sanhedrin in very early life. He was at Jerusalem 
when Stephen was stoned, and took part in inflicting that martyr- 
dom. That scene was to him as the sight of blood to a wild beast. 
His furious zeal for the Pharisaic interest led him to volunteer to 
persecute the Christians every-where. On such an errand he was 
when his conversion took place at Damascus. 

A remarkable fact in Paul's history is his retirement to Arabia 
for the three years which next followed his conversion. Learned 
as he was in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew literature, he seems to have 
secluded himself after his baptism to study the new religion and 
his relation to it. Let young converts who are rash to rush at 
work, and who feel as if the world would be lost if they did not 
commence preaching at once, ponder Paul's Arabian seclusion. At 
the close of it he reported himself to the disciples at Jerusalem, and 
then went to his home to await the providence of God. 

In the meantime between his own city and Jerusalem, namely, 
in Antioch, there had come to be a great center of Christian in- 
fluence. At the solicitation of Barnabas Paul wrought there a 
year. The first thing which brought him into close official connec- 
tion with the church at Jerusalem was his bringing aid to the 
Christians there from the church at Antioch. That done, he estab- 
lished his head-quarters at Antioch. From it he prosecuted three 
missionary tours. 

In the first he was accompanied by Barnabas and John Mark. 
It embraced the isle of Cyprus and the three provinces of Pam- 
phylia, Pisidia, and Laconia, in Asia Minor. In every place, so far 
as practicable, he established churches after the model of that of 
Jerusalem. About A. D. 50 the first Christian council was held. 
Its occasion was the attempt of Jewizing teachers to fasten the 
Mosaic ritual, especially circumcision, on the Gentile converts. 
Paul's liberality and breadth of mind had lifted him above such 
narrowness. He saw plainly that Christianity was going to be 
something higher and larger than a mere Jewish sect. It may be 
remarked, in passing, that, from his day to this, Christian councils 



FOR E VER Y FIRESIDE. 4 1 7 

have been engaged on questions created by the attempts of narrow- 
sectarians to bind the free spirit of Christianity. In the first 
council the powerful intellect of Paul gained the day for liberal 
measures. 

After that occurred his second missionary tour, which was accom- 
plished in company with Silas, and embraced Cilicia and the regions 
he had already traversed and the churches he had already founded. 
At Paul's solicitation Timotheus joined the party, and the mission- 
aries proceeded through central Asia Minor to the western coast. 
Thence, moved, as he believed, by the Holy Spirit, Paul went with 
his companions over to Europe, and commenced his work at Phi- 
lippi, where, through the influence of a woman, Christianity was in- 
troduced into that continent which has since become the strong- 
hold of the religion of Jesus. For many days all was quiet in this 
first little European church ; but a sudden storm broke. There was 
a party who trafficked in divination, and one of the female slaves 
following the apostles cried after them in words of compliment. 
This she did for several days. Paul saw that if this thing continued 
the glorious Gospel of the Son of God would soon get to be asso- 
ciated in the popular mind with the low work of these mediums. 
Whatever psychic force the woman had, Paul broke it in the name 
of Jesus. This took away the gains of her masters, and those 
mountebanks so influenced the Roman authority that Paul and Silas 
were cast into prison, after having been publicly scourged. In the 
night as they sang there was an earthquake, and when the jailer 
saw how serene and peaceful were these tortured prisoners a new 
light broke upon him, and he became a convert to the new faith. 
The next day the authorities of the city became aware that Paul 
was a Roman citizen, and honorably discharged him from prison. 
His manliness was conspicuous on this occasion. He had been un- 
justly thrust into prison ; he would not accept his liberty and walk 
out, but demanded that his unjust judges should come and bring 
him out with honors. True meekness is always manly. 

Thence Paul and his companions went to Thessalonica, where 
many converts were made, but where also a persecution was raised 
against him. The fanaticism of his Jewish opponents made Paul's 
position so perilous that he went to Berea ; but the Jews of Thes- 



4 l8 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

salonica followed him there and drove him from that place ; but not 
until he had set the people to reading the word of God, to see 
whether the things which he taught were true. 

At the urgency of his friends Paul retreated to Athens. The 
story of his public disputations there, and the report of his extraor- 
dinary speech on the Godhood delivered upon Mars' Hill, and 
probably almost under the shadow of that remarkable work of 
Phidius, the Colossus of Minerva, are set forth in the Acts of the 
Apostles. We do not know how long he remained in this city, but 
converts were made, and among them a member of the court of the 
Areopagus. 

From Athens, the seat of learning, he went to Corinth, the seat 
of luxury, and supported himself there by the labor of bis hands in 
tent-making. He preached the Gospel for nearly two years, and 
established a flourishing church, to which he directed several letters, 
two of which are in the sacred canon. 

Thence going to Antioch he remained a short season resting 
himself, and in the autumn of the year left this city for the last 
time, to make his third and last missionary journey. His first 
station was Ephesus, in which city he remained three years, exerting 
a powerful moral influence and making many converts. It was at 
Ephesus that he induced the magicians to burn their books at a 
great pecuniary sacrifice. But even pride of opinion is not so 
strong as covetousness. The silversmiths of Ephesus had been 
accustomed to manufacturing portable shrines of Diana, whose 
great temple was in their city. When May, the month of Diana, 
came round, a great crowd were assembled in Ephesus. These arti- 
sans perceived that the doctrines of Paul were diminishing their 
sales, and that induced them to stir up the passions of the populace. 
There was confusion and a mob. 

Paul went to Macedonia in great dejection because of some 
chronic malady with which he had long suffered, and which he 
described as a " thorn in the flesh." He was always burdened 
with " the care of all the churches;" but here he was cheered by the 
arrival of Titus, who brought good news from the Corinthian 
church. 

Before carrying out his intention to go to Rome Paul determined 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 419 

to visit Palestine. It was on this voyage that he stopped at 
Miletus, and had his affecting interview and parting with the elders 
of the Church of Ephesus. Every-where on the route his friends 
seem to have endeavored to dissuade him from going to Jerusalem; 
yet " bound in spirit " he went forward. 

It was probably at the feast of Pentecost, A. D. 58, that Paul 
and his party arrived in Jerusalem. Seeing the elders of the church 
he laid before them some account of his wide and varied journeys 
and of his abundant labors in declaring the new gospel and plant- 
ing the new church. Those who acknowledged Christ in Jerusalem 
could hardly yet be called Christians. Because of their local posi- 
tion in the holy city the party in Jerusalem seem to have been re- 
garded throughout the whole Roman Empire as the very center of 
the church. In point of fact, as yet they were a mere Jewish sect ; 
and we cannot read the account of Paul's interview with them with- 
out a feeling of chagrin that so great a man should for a season 
have allowed himself to be led by such little men. But Paul had 
not been on the spot. He was governed by the representations 
which the local society made. They were afraid of losing members, 
and were willing to yield the liberty of the Gospel to the bondage 
of Mosaicism rather than diminish the number of their party. 
" Do this, therefore, that we say to thee," was their proposition to 
Paul. In an unfortunate moment he did it, and this was " it":. 
They had a party of four who were discharging a Nazaritic vow. 
Paul joined them, at the suggestion of the elders, and was seen with 
them in the temple purifying himself after the fashion of the Jews. 
The tact of Paul appears in all his history as extraordinary, and 
tact is the cousin of grace ; but tact never necessitated a hollow and 
mere politic expediency. Sometimes the truest Christian tact is to 
knock error square between the eyes, sometimes to let it fall of its 
own weight and weakness, and always to be unexacting in things 
which are unnecessary. 

But in this case the elders of Jerusalem wrought so upon the 
goodness of Paul as to place him in a position of peril from which 
they could not extricate him. He was seen in the temple and 
seized on the charge of desecrating the sacred precincts by bring- 
ing Gentiles therein. He was rescued by the Roman guard and sent 
27 



420 



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to Caesarea, to Felix. Felix discovered that he was innocent ; but 
if the elders in Jerusalem were ecclesiastical time-servers Felix was 
a political demagogue. To play his advantages he detained Paul 
two years and then offered him a trial at Jerusalem, which he knew 
would issue in his destruction, and which he refused. Using his 
right as a Roman citizen he appealed to the Emperor, and to 
Rome he was sent. 

In Acts 27 we have an account of his perilous voyage. He is 
supposed to have arrived at the capital in the spring of 61. Here 
he remained two years under military guard, and while Nero was 
upon the throne Paul preached the Gospel privately with such 
success that converts were made even in that vile Caesar's house- 
hold. On his first trial he was acquitted ; then follows an interval 
of which we have no authoritative information, although there seem 
to be indications that he may have prosecuted a missionary tour 
even as far west as Spain. He returned to Rome, where he was 
again arrested, tried, condemned, and decapitated. The date is 
uncertain ; some authorities place it in A. D. 65, while others make 
it February 22, A. D. 68. 

It is impossible to overestimate Paul's influence upon the world. 
At this day it is immense. He took the simple facts of the life, death, 
and the resurrection of Jesus Christ and formed them into a gos- 
pel which has changed the whole face of the world. In a crevice in 
the huge rock of the Roman Empire he planted the seed of truth, 
and it split and shattered the rock. He cared little for the form of 
organic societies. He was not stringent for constitution and by- 
laws. He perpetually inculcated the ethical force of order in all 
things, especially in Christian work. He was large and liberal. 
He planted himself only on that which must be absolutely pre- 
served, and for its perservation he gave up every thing else. He 
became all things to all men that he might save some. He taught 
the doctrine of the ennobling effects of suffering, and he demon- 
strated it in his life. He was a man of the strongest convictions, of 
the keenest appreciations, and the largest charities. He was seized 
and mastered by the conviction that Jesus Christ by the grace of 
God had tasted death for every man ; and that fact, in his eyes, put 
all men on an equality in the sight of God's grace. It was this which 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 421 

enabled him to preach the gospel of the universal redemption and of 
the church catholic. Always an invalid, always misunderstood by 
some, always persecuted, always burdened with the churches, and 
at last, like his Master, forsaken of all men, this man had but one 
purpose and one pursuit from the day the convincing glory of Jesus 
burst on his eyes outside the gates of Damascus until the day 
when, outside the Ostian gate of Rome, his spirit shot up from his 
beheaded body to wear the eternal crown of righteousness. 

In another particular the close of his life was like that of his 
Master. His sun went down in darkness and in blood. The hearts 
of real Christians were failing them. Fanatical sectaries were per- 
secuting the true disciples. The imperial persecutions had swept 
over the Christian societies destructively. He did not know that 
the letters which he had written, and which those little societies 
had, in times of persecution, hidden away in their archives, were to 
be gathered by the hand of Providence and formed into a sacred 
canon. He did not know that he was to stimulate and inform the 
greatest intellects that should succeed him. He did not know that 
on that very road on which he walked betv/een the Roman guards 
to the place of his decapitation there should be built a superb 
edifice to bear his own name, to be dedicated to the religion of 
Jesus, and to be enriched by the gifts of the kings of the earth. 
He did not see Saint Paul's-outside-the-gate and Saint Peter's in 
the Leonine City, and the Pantheon consecrated to the new faith. 
He did not know that a Christian should be a Roman Emperor, and 
Rome itself the capital of a church which should represent that 
spiritual kingdom which was to spread further than Roman war- 
rior had ever conquered or Roman poet had ever dreamed. He 
did not know that, after eighteen centuries had rolled over his grave 
in the catacombs, it should come to pass that there should never be 
a single instant, day or night, in which some man should not be 
studying, or expounding, or in some manner propagating the princi- 
ples which he had taught. He did not know that the verdict of the 
generations should place him side by side with Moses, and regard 
them both as lifted together above any altitude of human great- 
ness occupied by any mere man. 

But he was great enough to live a life of the grandest heroism 



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because of the conviction which he thus expressed : " I know 
whom I have believed, and that which I have committed to him 
he will keep to that day," and to die like a conqueror, shouting 
" I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept 
the faith ; henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteous- 
ness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day." 
That diadem he now wears among the supernal immortals, while 
he stands among the immortals of human history wearing the 
tiara of prophet, apostle, and martyr. 



GREATER WORKS. 



Our great Master said (John xiv, 12), " He that believeth on me, 
the works that I do shall he do also ; and greater works than these 
shall he do, because I go unto my Father." In advance, we should 
expect a religion of divine origin to be adapted to the development 
of the highest capability of our nature. Now, we know that the 
power to believe in truth and to act upon it, confident of its validity, 
whatever may be the appearances to the contrary, is the highest 
capability of our intellectual and moral constitution. True great- 
ness resides in the development of our highest capability ; and if 
that be to climb up on another it is no degradation so to climb. 
The best the morning-glory can do is to grow up on trellises ; 
it is no shame for this plant thus to grow. The oak can grow with- 
out trellis, but the oak must have soil ; it is no shame that it grows 
rooted in the soil. Men look at the outside, God at the inside. 
Actions arouse the enthusiastic applause of men, but it is the spirit 
which performs the action that is admired by God. It is faith in 
the divine administration of the universe which lies back of all great 
discoveries and achievements ; faith being the prompter, sustainer, 
soul of action, and being as much superior to action as spirit is to 
body. This could be illustrated in ten thousand cases. Take that 
of Columbus. How we magnify his discovery of America! But 
that was almost nothing. America lay in his path. He could not 
help the discovery, if the planet were a globe and he sailed west- 
ward ! ' The real greatness was in himself; in his faith in certain 
truths ; faith that led him to besiege courts, endure privations, face 



FOR E VER Y FIRESIDE. 42 3 

ridicule and scorn. There was the greatness. Columbus's faith was 
a thing greater than all visible continents. 

True religion always develops faith and lets that form the practice. 
A morality constructed on rules is powerless. A man that does right 
because he believes he ought to do right may be trusted ; but a man 
who does not steal because it is a fracture of a rule is perpetually 
liable to become a thief. The story of Paradise, as given in the 
Bible, shows that the state of our first parents was a condition for 
the development of their faith. What was the forbidding of one 
fruit, and only one, but a test of man's faith in his heavenly Father's 
wisdom and goodness ? Then came the deluge. Study that inter- 
val between the command to Noah to build the ark and the down- 
pouring of the flood. Was it not a hundred and twenty years of 
the discipline of faith ? Take the history of Exodus, that prolonged 
journey from Egypt to the Promised Land. Can you understand 
this without regarding it as a trial of faith, a development of faith, 
in the Israelites ? Was not the whole space of time from the settle- 
ment of Israel in Palestine to the death of our Lord a discipline of 
faith? And has not the same thing been going on ever since? 

Enough is revealed to us now to be the basis of faith, but no such 
revelation need ever be expected as shall supplant faith by knowl- 
edge ; such a thing would be a disaster. Jesus Christ came to pre- 
sent a permanent object of faith and a perpetual source of spiritual 
power. He was " God manifest in the flesh," and he says, " Ye 
believe in God, believe also in me." That his teachings should have 
a controlling influence over men it was necessary that they should 
believe in his divinity. Both by works and words he partially created 
this conviction; and, what is so almost constantly overlooked, there 
is no greater proof of the divinity of our Lord than is shown by the 
very transfer of the same kind of moral power to all who really lead 
lives of faith in him. " The works that I do shall ye do." What 
works did Jesus do to which he had reference? Certainly he did 
not include the work of atoning sacrifice, which could be made by 
none who was not at once God and man. Of what was the Master 
talking? Of his oneness with the Eternal Father; of his divinity, 
his essential deity. Now, whatever in any age is needed to set this 
forth to the world sufficiently to convince unprejudiced, willing, and 



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intelligent minds, shall from age to age be granted to those who 
believe in Jesus. No amount or quality of evidence can convince 
the unwilling. Jesus wrought miracles. So did his disciples. In 
the Acts of the Apostles we learn that the shadow of Peter healed 
diseases, that devils were cast out by aprons taken from St. Paul, 
and that Elymas was struck blind. 

But miracles are instructive to the human intellect only in its 
childhood. They are the products of any intellect that knows how 
to employ the laws not generally known. All who believe in Jesus 
shall at any time be able to perform miracles, when miracles are 
necessary. But they are never needed by a religion which has once 
grown large and strong enough to stand alone, and certainly the 
Christian religion does not need miracles. Miracles are on the 
plane of the material and perishable. Miracles are temporary and 
must be few. 

The building up of a high, strong, holy character out of one that 
is depraved and low is a greater work than raising Lazarus. 

The elimination and preparation of a truth is greater than is a 
miracle which only changes water to wine or multiplies loaves. 

Men who lead holy lives do, by so living, carry greater conviction 
to the hearts of the world than if they wrought miracles, in the vul- 
gar sense of that word. Under the preaching of probably each one 
of the apostles more people were converted than under the ministry 
of Christ, and more under the influence of humble Christians in our 
day than under any of the apostles. " Such honor have all his 
saints." Have you? 



TRUSTING IN RICHES. 



In the tenth chapter of Mark this record is made : 
" And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, How 
hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God ! 
And the disciples were astonished at his words. But Jesus answer- 
eth again, and saith unto them, Children, how hard is it for them 
that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God ! It is easier 
for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to 
enter into the kingdom of God." 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 425 

The words of Jesus, like the words of all other teachers, must be 
read in the light of common sense ; without that they are always 
liable to be perverted. The passage which we have just copied 
is one that has been the subject of such perversion. It is quoted, 
and requoted, as if leveled against the possession of large amounts 
of material wealth. Now, surely, Jesus did not teach that it was 
wrong to possess wealth, for the life which he taught his disciples 
to lead is such a life as will naturally make them capitalists. The 
cultivation of the intellect and of the heart, the employment of the 
brains and the hands, useful and intelligent activity — these things 
are necessary to the Christian life, and these things ordinarily result 
in the accumulation of material wealth in larger or smaller amounts. 

Nor is the absence of material wealth — capital, if you choose to 
call it so — a thing to be denounced, unless it be the product of idle- 
ness, wastefulness, and bad habits. A man may decline to lay up 
vast amounts of wealth because he has deliberately come to the con- 
viction that money would better be put aside for some good object 
than be appropriated to his own personal uses. In such a case the 
man's object is heroic. The difficulty in entering the kingdom is 
not in having great possessions or in lacking them. It is, as the 
great Teacher himself explains, in trusting in riches. " How hard 
is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God." 
Having riches and trusting in riches are two very different things. 
There are a thousand poor men who trust in riches to one rich man 
who trusts in riches. Let no poor man think that he is free from 
this great disability just because he is poor. Does he not trust in 
riches ? Then what mean those dreams with which his sleep is filled 
—dreams of caverns piled with gold, dreams of such wealth as no 
Aladdin's lamp ever was able to discover? What means that thought 
perpetually running through his waking hours — " If I had only ten 
thousand dollars ; " or, " If I only had a hundred thousand dollars ; " 
or, " If I only had a million dollars?" As if the possession of any 
one of these amounts would make him independent, supply the 
desires of his soul, and secure the destiny of his future ! Is not a 
man who has thoughts like these a man who trusts in riches? 

Whatever it is on which we depend to make us independent of 
our fellow-men and of God, to supply pur present wants and secure 



42 6 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

our future, that is the thing in which we trust. It is important that 
the poor should look at this. With great complacency they hear 
ministers read this passage from the pulpit and feel as though it 
could not have reference to them. A poor man wasting his energies 
and struggling with all his might to accumulate a little fortune is a 
man who may more trust in riches than his neighbor worth a million 
sitting at a short distance from him, and sitting there in the sure 
conviction that millions upon millions cannot satisfy his soul and 
cannot secure his future. In such a case as this the poor man trusts 
in riches and the rich man distrusts them. The rich man's chance 
of salvation may be better than the poor man's. 

Nevertheless, while this is true it behooves the rich man to con- 
sider carefully, while riches increase, that he does not set his heart 
upon them. No man can enter the kingdom of heaven who does 
not expect that the kingdom is to supply his present and secure his 
future. He is not to trust in riches ; he is not to rely upon poverty. 

The deceitfulness of riches is a biblical proverb. Men are deceived 
while they are seeking wealth, and they are deceived by wealth when 
they secure it. It brings many things that are necessary and many 
that are agreeable ; but the things the soul most wants can neither 
come nor go with material wealth. 



CHRISTIAN PHILANTHROPY. 

The difference between the inculcations of the Gospel upon this 
subject, and those of all other religions and all other philosophies, is 
this : that they endeavor to awaken philanthropy by presenting man 
to his fellow-man either in his own nature or in his relation to his 
fellow-man ; whereas Christianity teaches me to love my fellow-man, 
neither for what he is in himself, nor what he is to me, but for what 
he is to God. Outside of Christianity we are taught that we are to 
love a man because he is a man ; the simple fact of the segregation 
of his species from every other species being, according to this philos- 
ophy, a sufficient ground of affection. That is generally supposed 
to be the meaning of Terence's famous line: 

" Homo sum ; humani nihil a me alienum puto" 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



427 



The utter futility of any such sentiment to produce any practical 
benefit to human character and to the human race is shown by the 
fact that the very crowds who applauded this splendid line could 
gloat upon the gladiatorial show and turn down the thumb for the 
destruction of a wretch who had fallen in the arena. 

The other ground of love for our fellow-men is in their relations 
to ourselves or in their characters. Thus the ties of consanguinity, 
the relations instituted by marriage, the friendships occasioned by 
affinities, the advances made to us by those who know how to please 
us, on the one hand ; and on the other, sweet, charming, admirable 
characteristics in our fellow-men. 

The objection to this ground is its exceeding narrowness. Any 
one man's known kins-people and relations must be very few as com- 
pared with the population of the whole globe. If he is to love only 
those who love him the exercise of his affections is on the small 
spaces of selfishness, and not in the large fields of philanthropy. 

The Gospel teaches us that God loves every man, regardless of 
our human distinctions of saint and sinner. In his sight all men 
are sinners, and by his infinite heart all these sinners are loved. A 
Christian's life must be a life animated by that belief and stirred by 
that sentiment. The man may not be sweet, nor charming, nor 
admirable ; the woman may be ugly and hateful ; but the Christian 
is always to remember that, however earthly and sensual and devil- 
ish any man or woman may become, that man, that woman, is dear 
to the heart of God. So, if this precept be obeyed, a Christian man 
will have his whole life shaped by the spirit of love for God and 
love for man. 



CAUSING TO OFFEND. 

No one can gainsay the authoritative utterances of the divine 
Master and his inspired apostles. Jesus said: "And whosoever 
shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better 
for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were 
cast into the sea " (Mark ix, 42). Paul said : *' It is good neither to 
eat flesh nor to drink wine, nor any thing whereby thy brother 
stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak" (Rom. xiv, 21). 



4 28 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

Under these precepts for behavior there must be some most im- 
portant doctrines, based on the character of God and the relation- 
ship of men. They are sufficiently severe to arouse the conscience 
even of Christians who are not oversensitive. Many conscientious 
Christians have used them for excessive self-torment. Nothing 
should be said or written to relax in any man a binding sense of the 
obligations of duty; but as there are always two sides to every ques- 
tion it may be well enough occasionally to look at the side least 
thought of. It is true that being drowned is a small catastrophe 
compared with that which shall befall any man who shall inten- 
tionally cause the least and feeblest believer in Jesus to fall away 
from his faith ; or, as our version expresses it, ''who shall offend 
one of these little ones." But would it not be well enough to re- 
mind these " little ones" who believe in Christ that they must not 
be too quick to take offense — that they must not fall away at every 
little thing in the behavior of their brethren which they cannot 
understand or approve ? It will not help the " little ones " when the 
brother who caused the offense is held down in the bottom of the 
sea by a millstone around his neck. The "little ones" must not 
suppose that they will be standing on the other bank, like Aaron 
and Miriam, shouting over the dead Pharaoh. The one was 
drowned because he behaved with such want of piety and fraternity 
as to cause the little one to break his neck. But will that mend the 
little one's neck? Moreover, it is probably true that very often the 
state of affairs painted in this passage seems to be taking place- 
when, in reality, it is not. Some one in a church seems to be such a 
" little one " as is described in the text. Well, he is " little " 
enough ; but being little is not all that is necessary to bring a man 
under the representation of the character here made by our Lord, 
The greatest and most royal soul in Christendom may be one of 
Christ's " little ones ;" because either he has very simple faith in the 
Lord or just the beginnings of true faith. He stands in contrast 
with the multitudes of those narrow, dwarfed souls who creep into 
the Church and call themselves " Christ's little ones." This class 
of people are all the while aching to take offense. They are never 
satisfied until some brother does a thing which they can make the 
occasion of offense to themselves. When such a thing does occur 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 429 

it does not shake their faith in Christ ; it simply offends their over- 
weening self-conceit. It is intolerable that the manly repose of 
true-hearted Christian men who love God and love their fellow 
Christians should be disturbed, and that they should have their lives 
spoiled by standing in constant dread of offending " little ones ' 
who have only such claim to that name as vermin have. 

Christ's true " little ones " are the last to make offense and the 
class most difficult to offend. It is because these precious souls are 
such that the sin of causing them to offend is one whose enormity was 
so vivid in the sight of Christ. When we come to Paul's precept it 
reads as if it were better for a Christian man to die than to cause his 
brother to stumble, or do wrong, or become weak ; for if a man is 
neither to eat flesh, nor drink wine, nor any thing — that is, if he is 
to abstain from eating and drinking altogether, which Paul says he 
would better do than destroy a soul — is it not well for that member 
who stumbles, or is offended, or is made weak, to examine his own 
soul? Why should he stumble because his brother eats something 
or drinks something which he can neither eat nor drink ? W T hy 
does he take an offense because he thinks his brother has com- 
mitted an offense ? Why does he become weak because his brother 
is strong? 

A survey of Christian society would seem to show that scores of 
so-called Christians are using the sayings of the Master and of his 
apostles as the credentials of an inquisitor rather than as the de- 
fense of weak Christians. Suppose, for instance, you have a preju- 
dice against a certain dress or diet, and your brother has none ; 
that he can wear that dress and indulge in that diet and be spot- 
less before God and comfortable in his life. Further, suppose you 
employ your prejudice to annoy him, to interfere with the liberty 
wherewith' Christ hath made him free, to disturb his peace of mind, 
and perhaps cause him to offend ; how now, weak brother ? Is the 
Lord going to pardon your maliciousness on the score of your weak- 
ness ? Are the weak to rule the strong, the narrow to rule the 
broad, the little to rule the great ? If this other side were looked at 
oftener fewer offenses would come. If men would carefully ex- 
amine the question whether they have a right to be offended on 
any ground of relationship to Christ and his people, and whether 



430 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



the offenses they take are not simply on the ground of their 
personal vanity, we are sure that in nine hundred and ninety-nine 
cases of every thousand in which these passages are quoted they 
would be dropped as inapplicable ; a better atmosphere would fill 
the house of God, and a more natural and manly Christianity would 
take the place of the strait and degraded ritualism which is dictated 
by narrowness and enforced by bigotry. 



LOOKING. 



What we see in any thing or any man is largely due to the eyes 
with which we look. It is a rule that we ordinarily bring from any 
thing according to that which we carry to it. 

A picture, one of Raphael's, must always be the same in itself, but 
is it not really as many pictures as there are beholders? An untu- 
tored child sees in it only a group of persons, perhaps only a 
woman and child. An anatomist sees something which never 
enters the eyes of the child. An artist sees a third picture, a poet 
a fourth, a saint a fifth. It depends upon the eyes and, still more, 
upon what is behind the eyes. 

An old blind beggar sits by the way-side. To the political econo- 
mist who passes by he seems a factor in the great system we call 
" society." An oculist does not see that picture at all, but he does 
behold a very interesting patient. The artist sees what he after- 
ward reproduces in a picturesque sketch, the poet what he after- 
ward weaves into the lines of a touching poem. A philanthropist 
beholds an object of charity, a destitute and afflicted fellow-being. 
As Jesus looks upon the man he sees a soul for whose salvation he 
has an unutterable longing. It is what is in the beholder rather 
than in the spectacle. 

In many places in the history of our Lord there is the statement 
that Jesus " looked." If only those on whom he looked could have 
known what was behind those eyes how they would have been 
thrilled ! In the third chapter of the Acts of the Apostles is a 
story one phrase in which led to what is written above. Peter and 
John were going up to the temple to worship. It was " the hour 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



431 



of prayer." A lame man lay at the gate which was called " Beauti- 
ful." Many had seen him that day. Perhaps Peter and John had 
seen him often before. But somehow on this occasion Peter looked 
with different eyes — that is, with a different state of mind and heart. 
The phrase, " fastening his eyes upon him," is very impressive and 
instructive. Pentecostal power had quickened and strengthened all 
Peter's faculties. Love for the ascended Lord and apostolic re- 
sponsibility had so transformed Peter that even on his way to pray 
he was moved to work. He looked upon the man, and as he 
looked the man gained a kind of fascination for the apostle, who 
saw in him not simply an ungainly beggar who had never walked, 
but a human being in whom might be shown the power of the 
ascended Jesus. 

And so the lesson comes to us all to take heed how we look as 
well as how we hear. The best preparation for the eyes is in the 
heart. A selfish man sees in every thing only an instrument for his 
selfishness or an obstruction to his selfish enjoyment. A generous 
man sees in the same things outlets for the refreshing and fertilizing 
streams of his soul. A sinister spirit can find faults every-where 
and in every being, even in saints, in martyrs, in apostles, and in 
Jesus ; and there is no human being living so utterly worthless that 
a truly Christian man can find nothing in him to love. 

Let us not judge the world and men by what we see in them, but 
by that judge ourselves. If all things seem yellow we have jaun- 
dice. If we see all the faults and none of the beauties of our 
fellow-men we may be sure that something has gone wrong with us. 
If we see only what w r e may pervert and destroy we are like the 
devil ; if our eyes seek and find something in every soul which we 
may make the field of operations for that soul's uplifting and sanc- 
tification we are like Jesus. 

When we recollect that the eyes of the Lord are upon us we are 
sometimes covered with confusion at the remembrance of the fact 
that he is looking upon a poor deformed beggar ; but it is a sustaining 
comfort to recollect that behind those eyes is the heart of the In- 
finite love and Infinite power, and that he rejoices to be able to use 
his power in order to glorify his love. Jesus " looked " on Peter ; 
and that look broke his heart, but saved his soul. 



432 



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SUCCESSFUL FAILURES. 

It is not an entirely easy thing to decide what are successes and 
what are failures. Our limited faculties are exercised in the observ- 
ance of appearances, conditioned by so much that is infinite, and 
time and space have such power over facts, that no one who is not 
omniscient can judge what are to be the final outcomes of any thing 
that has already occurred. 

Therefore the men who live by faith and not by sight have not 
only more power than others, but actually more peace and comfort. 
All Christian life is an exercise and a discipline of faith. We must 
have perfect confidence in that providence which is always sure, 
although often so very slow. We cannot control the influences that 
are to play upon the actions of our lives in the long future, but we 
have control over the present action. We must do the thing that 
is right now ; we must discharge our present duty. That is all that 
concerns us. No human being could live under the prodigious 
weight of responsibility for all the results of his actions. There- 
fore the righteous Judge of all the earth holds us responsible only 
for our actions. 

Every Christian thinker who has observed the results of his actions 
in the past, so far as he could trace those results, must frequently 
have seen that what at the moment he thought a success has after- 
ward been shown to have been a failure. It seems, however, to be 
a characteristic of human nature to mark the failures rather than 
the successes of one's life. It is this which makes so much moral 
weakness among men and which proves such a discouragement to 
even sincere Christians. 

It is wholesome, therefore, to make note of every passage in life 
which seemed at the time to be a failure but afterward bore fruit of 
blessing for ourselves or others. No class of Christian workers are 
so liable to be discouraged as preachers of the Gospel. They so 
long to see immediate results. They are " keyed " so high that if 
circumstances do not sing up to their pitch they have a painful 
sense of discord and failure. I am minded to set down in this ar- 
ticle some facts which have come to my knowledge, which have 
encouragingly strengthened my own faith and may be helpful to my 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 433 

beloved brethren in the ministry of " the Gospel of the blessed God ; " 
and the principle underlying them should be very sustaining to all 
who work for Christ. 

A few evenings ago I was the guest of a venerable and honored 
Presbyterian pastor in Alabama. Among other things he said that 
one night he went to his church much depressed ; the weather was 
disagreeable, the congregation was unusually small, and when he 
concluded the service he felt that it was a lost evening from which 
he supposed no fruit would ever come. It was weeks afterward, 
when he opened the religious paper of his Church, published in 
Louisville, Ky., and without any special reason, before he laid the 
paper down, he turned to the Children's Department, which he had 
seldom looked at, when his eye was caught by the name of a little 
girl among his parishioners. It was attached to a letter in which the 
child had given a pretty fair account of the sermon he had reck- 
oned lost, embodying some sentences which had specially impressed 
her. It was done so well that the editor had seen fit to publish it. 
Here was a great enlargement to his audience. Some time after 
that he saw a poem from the pen of an American poetess, who had 
been struck by a sentence or two in the child's letter and had taken 
them as the theme of her poem. And so it turned out that the pith 
of that apparently lost discourse had been conveyed to a larger con- 
gregation than probably any other thing he had ever uttered. 

One Sunday evening, in another place, the threatening weather 
kept away almost all the congregation of an Episcopal church, and 
soon after the service opened it began to rain violently. To the 
rector it looked like a failure, and at the close he went home under 
the weight of that depression so well known to anxious pastors. 
There was in that parish a very respectable gentleman, generally 
regarded as skeptical about religious matters. Early on Monday 
morning he made his appearance at the rectory. It was his first visit 
to the pastor, and was naturally a surprise. The visitor waived all 
preliminaries and said earnestly, " My dear sir, I have come to ask 
you what I must do to be saved ! " He explained that his skepticism 
had been merely of that nature which kept him from believing that 
religion was a subject of any vital and personal importance to him- 
self, but that he had stepped into the church the evening before to 



434 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



shelter himself from the sudden shower, and that a passage in a 
hymn that had been sung so aroused him to his own spiritual danger 
that all night long he had been most deeply anxious about his spir- 
itual condition, and he felt that nothing else was worth attention 
until he had settled the question of his personal salvation. His 
conversion, which began with the service considered a failure, be- 
came an unspeakable blessing to that town. 

Many years ago a young Methodist preacher, just of age, was put 
up to preach at a camp-meeting in North Carolina. There were 
many older preachers present, and the youth was much abashed. He 
preached the Gospel the best he knew how, but was so ashamed of 
his performance that at the close of the service he left the place 
immediately and never went back, and had a sense of mortification 
whenever he heard the name. A quarter of a century later he was 
walking down Front Street, in Wilmington, when a gentleman meet- 
ing him hurried his steps and said, " I do believe this is Dr. ." 

" That is my name," was the reply. 

" Do you recollect preaching at B camp-meeting?" 

" Alas ! I can never forget that wretched failure." 

" Failure do you call it ? Why, sir, there were four of the wild- 
est young fellows in C County converted under that sermon, and 

I was one of them ; and by the grace of God I have been preaching 
the Gospel twenty years." 

Then he learned that the Lord's embassadors can never make any 
other than successful failures. 

In the village in which I am writing this article, while waiting for 
my train to take me to the town in Georgia where I lecture to-night, 
a minister, who is a faithful pastor and has a devoted wife, preached 
under circumstances of discouragement, and as he left the church 
said, " Wife, that was a failure ; wasn't it?" Her reply was that a 
lady belonging to another Church had come at the close of the 
service and requested the wife to thank her husband for a sermon 
which had been very helpful to at least one listener's soul. 

Let us all take heart. 

Let us do our very best every time. 

Let us leave the seed we have sown to him that is Lord of the 
harvest. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 435 

Let us make known to our pastors and other ministers the ser- 
mons which have been specially blest to us. 

Let us trace what we have considered failures to their " afterward," 
that our faith may be confirmed in God's assurance that his word 
shall not return to him void. 



" HEREAFTER." 



Space and time, both on the natural plane and the spiritual, have 
certain ideal connections. For instance, in the former, any fabric 
or structure or other visible thing presents one view from its front 
and another from its rear. Therefore, being before or behind any 
thing makes a very great difference. A visitor coming in front of 
a Gobelin tapestry, even when the last stitch has been put in by 
the artist, can have no idea from the hanging tags and threads what 
the design is. But often, when he goes behind the frame, the whole 
of it breaks upon him with the power and beauty of painting. 

So it is with time. " The coming event casts its shadow before," 
even when it is drawing its trailing garments of glory behind. It 
was a good conceit, that we never see the wings of Time until he 
has passed. He seems very slow in coming to us, but he goes away 
with great rapidity. 

It is ruinous self-deception not to take the afterward into account 
in every department of life. In business it is one thing to look at 
the transaction as proposed by another or projected by ourselves ; 
it is another to take into the account what will probably, in the 
nature of things, follow afterward. 

At the table it is one thing to consider the sweetness and delicacy 
of the viands and the strength of the call of appetite. It is 
another thing to consider the effect of any meal we may eat upon 
our bodily health. At dinner always consider after dinner. 

It is so in social life. A deed may in itself be trivial at the mo- 
ment of its performance, or a w T ord at the moment of its utterance. 
The saying of " yes " or " no " is not difficult to those who have the 
use of vocal organs, but from every "yes" and every ''no" there 
will probably come a series of events which must have great effect 

upon our own lives and upon the lives of others. 
28 



436 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



Both with God and man " the Now " must be, that " the Here- 
after " may be. That is a truism which it were not worth while 
to utter if it did not seem somehow to be generally ignored. 

Where " the Hereafter" is almost sure to be more pleasant than 
" the Now " we are intensely desirous of leaping over the one into 
the other. We are perpetually fooling ourselves, even in spiritual 
matters, with the desire to purchase without paying. " The Here- 
after " is very often the child of " the Now." What I am doing at this 
moment is as necessary for certain results which I wish to attain as 
cause is to effect. 

In a large measure — studying my own experience and that of many 
others — I can calculate somewhat the effect ; but there is one great 
factor, which the Christian must always consider, in what is to come 
afterward ; namely, what the free will of God will do with the prod- 
ucts of the free will of man. Now, we cannot calculate that; only 
that it will certainly appear that God is not indifferent to any thing 
there is in the universe, that every thing touches him, and he touches 
every thing intelligently and voluntarily. Our Master said to one of 
his disciples, " What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt 
know hereafter." It is a blessed thing for us that we do not know 
the hereafter of our Lord. If we did we might be perpetually 
interfering with it. We should certainly lose much of freedom of 
action, and in some cases the discipline through which the Master 
is going to take us in the next few years. Hereafter might so par- 
alyze our energy as to break our lives and interfere with his great 
moral government. It is so blessed not to know ! 

On the other hand it is blessed to know. The love of our Lord 
is shown to us in that he conceals the things we ought not to know 
and reveals those which it is profitable to know. He does make 
this revelation : that he is doing something that concerns us, that he 
is greatly interested in what he is doing, and that the result will be 
such as shall be good for us. It is on this ground that the apostle 
bases his statement that " our light afflictions are working for us a 
weight of glory," while we are looking — and only while we are look- 
ing — at the things which are unseen. The unseen things are in " the 
Hereafter," and in poverty, sickness, distress, destitution, and spirit- 
ual perplexity, in the eclipse of the Sun of Righteousness, we know 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



437 



that our darkness is only temporary, that in the near Hereafter the 
eclipse is sure to close, and as the intervening body is carried away from 
before the face of the sun by natural laws which prevail throughout 
the universe, so our spiritual eclipse will as surely terminate and by 
just as fixed laws in the spiritual world. 

The blessedness of " the Hereafter," also, is that, whereas the past 
is limited and the present is very limited, " the Hereafter " is bound- 
less. There are no possibilities in the past ; there are some in the 
present; there are all in " the Hereafter." 

" The Hereafter " adjoins " the Now." Twice in the gospels Jesus 
said, " Hereafter shall ye see; " and the words which he used meant 
that immediately after the time he spoke the things should begin 
to appear. 

Sometimes the causes of to-day produce their effects in long lapses 
of time. The hereafter of an action in boyhood may show itself in 
old age. The result of a good deed, of holy living, and of prayer, 
maybe delayed in the providence of God for a long season, but " the 
Hereafter " surely cometh. The good Father will never let break 
a single strand in the cable wherewith he holds the world to him- 
self. We should, therefore, patiently wait the Lord's coming, and 
neither hasten nor retard " the Hereafter." Believing his promises, 
hanging on his words, obeying his commands, we may safely leave 
"the Hereafter" without fear, without anxiety, and without de- 
spondency. 



THE GOLDEN RULE. 



What is called the Golden Rule is recorded in the Gospel accord- 
ing to St. Matthew (vii, 12) thus : " Whatsoever ye would that men 
should do unto you, do ye even so unto them." 

Perhaps there is no single sentence which has been oftener quoted 
in its very words and in its paraphrases than this. A Latin form 
renders it thus : "Quod tibi, hoc alteri" which means, "What ye 
would have for yourself, that give to another." There is also a 
negative form of the precept : " Quod tibi ipsi odiosum est, proximo 
ne facias • nam hac est tota lex," which may be rendered: " Never do 
to your neighbor what is hurtful to yourself; for this is the whole 



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Law." The paraphrase most in vogue is that of Matthew Henry, 
namely, " Do as you would be done by.'' 

In all ages and among all classes the precept has had immense 
admiration, from the day when the Emperor Alexander Severus 
caused it to be written in golden letters on the wall of his closet, 
quoted it often in the administration of public affairs, honored 
Christ as its author, and spared Christians for the sake of a religion 
which had set forth so admirable a precept. In the case of many 
men it seems to be the only passage in the Bible which they know, 
and there are those who profess it as the sum and substance of their 
religion. " Tota lex." They know no other law. 

And yet we submit that there is no sentence so often quoted which 
is so thoroughly misunderstood. Ordinarily he who employs it 
seems to think that it is a bridle put in his hand which he is to slip 
into the mouth of his neighbor to carry that neighbor whithersoever 
he would. 

The misapprehension lies in the idea that a man has a right to 
enforce the principle upon his neighbor. He has no such right. 
No human being is ever to quote it to another. He is to apply it 
to his own soul ; he is to make it the basis of an appeal to his own 
consciousness and to his own conscience, and never as the basis of 
an appeal to another. If this were kept in view men would be saved 
from the absurdities into which they are very frequently plunged by 
using this precept. 

Let us illustrate : We once heard a little boy pleading with his 
mother, who was correcting him, and this was the substance of the 
eloquent young urchin's appeal : " Now, mother, ain't you ashamed 
of yourself? You a great big woman, and me a little boy, and you 
licking me ! Now, mother, just suppose I was you and you was a 
little boy. Just think of that ! ' Do as you'd be done by,' mother! 
You know you would not want me to whip you ! " 

The child expressed the sentiment of a grown man who, having 
been caught and convicted of a crime, said in his heart, if not with 
his lips, as he received sentence at the hand of his judge : "Judge, 
now just put yourself in my place, and ' do as you would be done 
by.' How would you like to be sentenced to prison for all the rest 
of your natural life? How would you like to be torn from your 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 439 

seat on the bench, from the comforts of your home, from the com- 
pany of your family, and be locked up in a prison ? " Of course the 
judge would not like it. But what has that to do with the case ? 
The culprit has no right to make such a demand ; he has to apply 
the precept to himself alone. He has to say: " Now, this judge is 
about to condemn me — I must do by him as I would have him do 
by me. Suppose he were in my position and I in his ; I should then, 
by my oath of office, be compelled to pronounce a sentence accord- 
ing to law and according to the verdict of the jury. How would I 
like to have that judge consider me, if I were judge and he were 
culprit? Should I not wish him to put all personal enmity out of 
his heart and regard me as simply discharging my bounden duty ? 
If so, then, although the words of that man will rivet the chains of 
imprisonment on me all the days of my life, I must regard him with- 
out enmity." 

Take another case : A poor man applies to a rich man for money: 
money to keep him from bankruptcy, money to stop the foreclosure 
of a mortgage that might turn him out of his home. He is think- 
ing, and perhaps uttering, this precept, " Do as you would be done 
by," and he wishes the rich man to fancy himself in the position of 
the distressed applicant, and to do with a portion of his wealth 
what he would wish the applicant to do for him if their positions 
were changed. But this was not the meaning of the great Teacher. 
The applicant has no right to fasten the precept on the conscience 
of his neighbor, but he must apply it to himself. He must say 
something like this : " Suppose I were this rich man, and suppose 
there were thousands of appeals to me like that which I present to 
him ; and suppose I should go to the poor-house in a week if I 
granted one-half; and suppose for this and other considerations, 
such as the present state of my business, with which he is unac- 
quainted, I should refuse him. Now, I must take his refusal just 
as I should wish him to take mine if I were he and were compelled 
to refuse him." 

The Golden Rule is not an iron rod. It is not to be laid on another. 
It is to be worn by myself, and worn as a beautiful ornament. 

Am I member of the Church ? I must not look at my pastor and 
say in my heart, if I do not utter it to him with my lips, " Sir, I wish 



440 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

you would put yourself in my place, and then ' do as you would be 
done by.' Suppose you were a rich man, whose soul almost every 
body neglected while every body fawns on him for favors ; how 
would you like to be treated ? That is the way you must treat me." 
" Suppose you were a poor man absolutely devoid of the luxuries of 
life, scarcely, indeed, able to procure the necessaries, and I were in 
your place, having what you now possess, while you had my poverty. 
How would you wish me to treat you ? Treat me so." 

That is not the way. Neither the rich member nor the poor mem- 
ber has any right to lay down the law to his pastor. He is not the 
judge of another man, certainly not of the man appointed to rule 
over him in spiritual things. But each of these men must lay the 
Golden Rule on his own heart and say: " Now, suppose I were the 
pastor, and suppose he, as a private member, could not know all the 
burdens of my heart, the hundreds of people whose troubles and cares 
and spiritual interests are laid on my conscience, my time invaded 
by a thousand calls, my pulpit demanding careful preparation ; and 
suppose when I was doing my very best, laying out my work each 
morning and following it conscientiously until late bed-time, feeling 
that the Lord knew that I was doing -my utmost ; how, then, should 
I desire my parishioners to regard me ? Just in that way I am going 
to think of my pastor." 

Now, let us come around on the other side and take the pastor's 
position. He has no right to look at his parishioner and say : " ' Do 
as you would be done by.' You have several horses and carriages, 
some of which you seldom use, and you see me plodding through 
snow and wet at night visiting the rich and poor, just where I think 
my divine Master would have me go. You know that I must main- 
tain a certain style of living in my house because of the company 
I see — a style very superior to that of my poorest members, but 
very inferior to that of my richest members. You know how you 
expect my wife and children to dress when they receive the visits of 
your wife and children. You know that with the greatest economy I 
barely make my salary cover these expenses, and that the comforts of 
my home are enjoyed by my people more than by myself. You ought, 
therefore, to make frequent contributions, or at least one day in the 
week put a carriage at my disposal for my pastoral visitations." 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



441 



No ; the pastor has no right to say these things ; he would be 
binding the rule upon his parishioners instead of laying it upon his 
own heart. The pastor must put himself in the position of that 
rich man. See ! No man cares for his soul. He is surrounded by 
sycophants, he is flattered, he is made almost to feel himself a demi- 
god, he is exposed to spiritual perdition. The pastor must say : 
" Suppose I were in his place, in that prodigious peril, and suppose 
I were a conscientious preacher of the Gospel sent out to warn, 
rebuke, reprove, exhort, and entreat men, so that they may be 
saved ; how would I wish him to behave toward me ? That is my 
rule of behavior toward him. Suppose I were that poor man or 
that lone widow, or that deserted orphan. Suppose I were that 
young man in the midst of the city and in exposure; that young 
girl under a cloud ; that Christian brother, worn with labor or fretted 
by some physical disease; how would I like my pastor to behave 
toward me ? That must be my rule of behavior." All the more, 
because no other man dare lay it on him, must the pastor bind this 
rule on his own conscience. 

Now, look at those men whose whole religion, as they themselves 
profess, consists in doing " as they would be done by." Does any 
one of them always observe? No. Every man who makes that 
utterance must, upon examination of his life, discover that his claim 
to religion on this ground is wholly without foundation. " Do as 
you would be done by." Stop a moment and think. You are bound 
to apply that rule to yourself in regard to the dead man as much as 
you are to the living man. You must consider how you would wish 
men to treat your memory and your money after you have departed 
this life ; and that should be the rule of your behavior toward them. 
Is it?- Not at all. 



THE FIELD AT HAND. 

There are many persons in the Church who often feel a desire to 
be useful. When they reflect upon the great work which is yet to 
be done ; when they think of the halo which crowns and glorifies 
the names of the blessed dead who have served their generation, 
or when they read of some tremendous blow which has been dealt 



442 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

by a powerful arm to the idol which the world worships, or hear of 
some encounter on the great moral battle-field, in which the spiritual 
prowess of some lofty soul has turned the tide of war against the 
banners of Error — they long to do something which shall leave its 
mark on earth and carry its trophies to heaven. If all these long- 
ings resulted according to their dreams how many a glorious institu- 
tion would rise amid the world's crying wants ! how many an idle 
temple would be supplanted by a sanctuary of the most holy faith ! 
how many a dark place of the earth, wherein dwelleth cruelty, would 
be penetrated by the cheerful and healthful light of the Sun of right- 
eousness ! Why, with so many desires to do good, are they so com- 
paratively useless ? Is the defect in their heads ? No ! it is in their 
hearts. 

Allow me, young Christian reader, to show this to you, if I can. 
You wish to be useful. The spirit of our blessed religion is the 
spirit of doing good. It is also an enlarging spirit. " The field is 
the world " is a grand saying never to be forgotten. But your dif- 
ficulty is that you wish to sow the whole field over with one single 
grand broad-cast which shall fling into every furrow at once seed that 
shall instantly spring to a harvest to gladden earth, and, if possible, 
astonish heaven. You are not willing to take the little plot just 
before your door and clear it out by the patient picking out of rocks 
and grubbing up of roots ; that work is all too little for you and too 
unromantic. You will not have the stimulus of a thousand seeing 
eyes and a thousand encouraging smiles. Does not this show that 
there is something wrong at the heart ? You would be a missionary 
to China. You would like to be a Mrs. Judson, to have memoirs 
written of you when dead, and thousands of copies of volumes of 
memorial offerings published, with your name on the title instead 
of hers. That would be very fine. But you forget the fact that 
you do not labor faithfully, devotedly, without pride or vanity, in 
the nearest Sabbath-school, among the poor rieglected adults or 
children living on the same square in the same city with you, per- 
haps, or certainly within a mile or two of your father's residence — 
that you are not striving to make that father's family a model of a 
perfect Christian household, not training your brothers and sisters 
to the ways of the cross, not striving to bring the servants of the 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



443 



household to the blessed Saviour of us all ; that this failure on your 
part is positive proof that you are not ready to go from home to 
work for Jesus. Remember that those who go — if there be such 
deceived souls — to foreign lands for the mere name and grandeur of 
the thing have their reward on earth, and have nothing to look for 
in the skies. Remember, also, that a soul saved in your own village 
or at your own fireside, through your instrumentality, will shine as 
brightly in the crown which Jesus will give you, and will bring as 
much glory to his blessed name as though you found that soul in 
polar snows or oriental jungles. 

But you would be useful in your own country if you could only 
be sure that you possess such talents as such and such a one ; 
if you could only be a distinguished preacher, or could found or 
support an asylum, or a school, or some such benevolent institution. 
You have not yet discovered, perhaps — and the discovery may be 
painful to you when made — that some of the most talented, and, I 
will add, distinguished ministers of the Church are doing less for 
the cause of the Saviour than many an inferior and comparatively 
unknown brother. You forget that they are exposed to a thousand 
temptations which never reach the humbler and more hidden child 
of God. You do not recollect that the greatest injuries inflicted upon 
the Church of Jesus come from her most gifted sons. You are not 
to be judged by the measure which will be applied to them ; the 
rule for each to adopt in striving to do good is, Now, here, all I can, 
always. 

The disposition of the Church in this day would seem to be to 
undervalue, or at least to overlook the value of the plan of bringing 
men, soul by soul, to Jesus. We must do something splendid or 
nothing at all. The eclat of crowds, eloquence, magnificent machinery, 
is what attracts us. But suppose each member of the Church caught 
the soul-winning spirit and depended more upon God's blessing on 
the outshining of a holy heart in a holy life, and each so lived as in 
the course of every year to bring at least one more into the army of 
laborers — how soon would the world be converted ; thoroughly con- 
verted ! Read the memoirs of such humble men as Harlan Page 
and James Brainard Taylor, and then calculate upon the supposition 
that all church members did as much as they — and theirs was not a 



444 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

more favorable position than that of most Christians — and that the 
number of converts went on, as it should, in geometric ratio, and 
see how soon the world would be reclaimed to God and his Christ ! 



INSTRUMENTS. 

Our heavenly Father never does directly what he can do through 
others. He has begotten children in many respects like himself; 
like him in capability of knowing, feeling, acting; like him in the 
perfect freedom of their wills. He endows them. He gives them 
field. He gives them time. They must do all the rest. He will 
never do for any man, in any respect, what that man can do for him- 
self. He will never do for the race what the race can do for itself. 
He gives wood and iron and coal. But he never builds a vessel, 
hammers out a boiler, adjusts machinery, or raises steam. He 
never constructs a locomotive nor grades and lays a railway. He 
might have furnished Noah with a complete ocean steamer; but he 
did not. He let the patriarch hammer away at the ark through a 
century, but he did furnish him with the length, the breadth, and 
height, because there was no skill in him to discover these, and they 
could not be known by the light of nature. 

The eternal Father could, in the very beginning, have stocked the 
world with all the implements of agriculture and trade, with all the 
facilities for the most rapid and comfortable traveling, and the in- 
struments for scientific research, and have started his human family 
in housekeeping with every thing complete at once. But he did 
not. He put man down among the great acts of God, the great 
facts of the universe, the great laws of his government, with all the 
necessary physical, intellectual, and moral powers, and with due 
scope for their exercise, and man was to produce the result. God 
made the garden because man could not, and then set man to dress 
the garden because God would not. That has been his way ever, 
and will be his way forever. It is mere fanaticism to do or desire 
any thing different from this or contrary thereunto. 

It is reasonable to suppose that the eternal Father desires to have 
this earth brought to perfect cultivation, so that every spot shall be 
caused to bloom like the garden of the Lord or to be made like a 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 445 

part of his holy temple, so that human life shall be enjoyed in its 
perfection and the physical universe be the minister of the divine 
soul of man. In a moment, in a twinkling of the eye, he could make 
it such. But he does not. It may be centuries. It maybe cycles. 
He leaves man to advance steadily, learning from falls and failures 
and mistakes, each generation improving on its predecessor, until 
the earth shall be subdued to man and man shall be subdued to the 
obedience of Christ. There was no Golden Age behind us except 
in the minds of the poets. There is a Golden Age before us, and to 
that we must continually stretch forward. 

The same rule obtains in the religious and spiritual man. We are 
taught the lesson that man's agency precedes God's working ; that 
in the spiritual regeneration of men there is first the agency of their 
fellow-men, doing all they can do, and then the power of the mighty 
God doing what man cannot do. 

Hence we have the operation of the law of human influence, of 
husbands and wives, parents and children, teachers and scholars. 

The heavenly Father will not do for our children what their 
earthly parents can do. He w 7 ill not exert his omnipotence one par- 
ticle toward building up our Church in what we can do ourselves. 
He will not clean and warm and ventilate the building, and sing the 
hymns, and preach the sermons, and pay the pastoral visits, and in- 
struct the Sunday-school. Because we can do these things we 
must. 



WITHOUT OFFENSE." 



[Read the first chapter of the Epistle of Paul to the Philippians, and compare the 

10th and 27th verses.] 

A characteristic of the Christian life on which the apostle Paul lays 
emphasis is inoffensiveness — " without offense," as he calls it in the 
10th verse. The apostle probably intended by this to indicate two 
things ; namely, freedom from taking offense and freedom from giv- 
ing offense. There are some Christians who have such thin skins and 
long memories that the slightest thing that is disagreeable to them 
gives them not only immediate, but continuous pain. It is a bad habit 
of thought and feeling when a man is all the while imagining that 
every thing is done to offend him. Pastors and churches often see 



446 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

this displayed in a manner which is very trying. There are some 
Christians of whose presence you must always be aware; to whom 
you must always defer, whose feelings you must constantly study, 
and whose sensibilities you suspect that even your compliments will 
wound. They ordinarily consider themselves sensitive — that is the 
elegant and apologetic term which they apply to their characteris- 
tic ; whereas the real fact is that their skin has been eaten off by an 
excessive vanity and left the flesh bare, to be wounded by every 
feather and every thread that touches it. It is a most unchristian trait. 

A Christian man' is to conquer his self-consciousness. He is to 
have a heart at leisure from itself to sympathize with others. He 
is to be taken up so with his thoughts of others — their wants, their 
desires, their pleasure — not looking on his own things only but also 
on the things of others, that he will not pay attention to the man- 
ner in which he is treated until some direct and plainly intentional 
act is performed, or word spoken, in order to give him pain. Even 
then he will bear it meekly. Even apart from religious considera- 
tions a gentleman must cultivate the habit of supposing that every 
speech made of him is intended to be complimentary. If it does not 
sound so he must conclude that it was a compliment infelicitously 
worded or awkwardly expressed. If a friend seems to slight him it 
is only generous to suppose that that friend may be greatly pre- 
occupied with some important business or harassing anxieties. 
Christians should be full of all kinds of charitable suppositions. 

The writer knows many cases illustrative of this quickness to take 
offense, but will give the reader only the two latest that have been 
told him. There was a pastor in a large city into whose church there 
came a young girl whose parents had seen better days, and who was 
then employed in business to make a livelihood. She did this so 
bravely that it quite won the pastor's respect. He gave her his at- 
tention, interested himself in all her connections ; he visited her in 
tenement houses, many a time climbing weary stairs to pay her pas- 
toral visits, cheer her and pray w T ith her. In the course of years he 
came to regard her as a daughter. He married her to her husband. 
He baptized her children. He met her from Sunday to Sunday with 
the kind and respectful familiarity with which a Christian gentleman 
treats his intimates. One Sunday, after an absence, at the close of 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 447 

the service, when he descended the chancel, a number of persons 
came to speak to him. Among them was a stranger, to whom the 
pastor gave his right hand, expressing his thanks for the courtesy 
of speaking to him and encouraging the stranger to revisit the 
church. His friend came up to him at the same moment and 
stretched out her hands, and, having but one hand disengaged, he 
gave it to her. It was the left hand. She fired at such a slight as 
this. The pastor had not even noticed it, and probably never would 
have known it if she had not complained to other persons who in- 
formed him. He immediately sought her. She was absent from 
home. His visit was returned by a letter from her husband request- 
ing her church letter. The pastor took it to her and said he would 
give it to her cheerfully to go to the church where she could receive 
the most spiritual benefit, but that it seemed quite natural that he 
should be informed what was the occasion of the breaking in this 
long friendship. She confessed it was the giving of the left hand, 
and nothing else. And so she went away, and so the pastor was 
made to feel that he was afraid to have an intimate friend in his 
congregation, lest he should presume upon the intimacy, and for that 
presumption do harm to some soul. 

The other one was this : A husband and wife sent for their letter 
to their pastor. He carried the letter to them and desired to know 
what had led to the change : whether they were about to move to 
another place. It turned out that the whole trouble was that a 
certain prominent officer had been in a store where the gentleman 
was clerk and had failed to recognize him and speak to him, and 
that the same official had allowed them to pass him as he stood in 
his pew-door and had not spoken to them. The pastor was afraid 
there was some mistake, and so he hastened to the official and asked 

him if he knew Mr. and Mrs. . He said, " I do not ; but I know 

that there are such persons, members of the church, and I have been 
anxious to become personally acquainted with them, and I trust that 
you will point them out to me or introduce them." Now, here was 
this church officer most innocently losing two members of the 
church. Whose fault was it ? Were they not quick to take offense? 
Were these lives just such lives "as becometh the Gospel of Jesus 
Christ ? " 



448 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



But, whether the apostle meant quickness at taking offense or not, 
it seems very clear that he must have meant by this phrase the un- 
necessary giving of offense. The word which he used meant run- 
ning against some one — the stumbling against him. Now, it is not 
to be supposed for a moment that any man who is at all a Christian 
will intentionally, with malice prepense, give any offense to any 
human being. The trouble is this — as an English poet says : 

Evil is wrought by want of thought, 
As well as want of heart. 

Men have no right to drive their horses furiously through a 
crowded city. Christians will be careful not even to run selfishly, 
with eagerness, where they may knock men down. The world must 
be made to feel that every compact which a Christian man seeks to 
make with it is a compact for its comfort, support, and guid- 
ance. A life which does not make this impression is an offen- 
sive life, and men may make what apology their selfishness shall 
dictate and their ingenuity frame, but still it stands to reason that 
that kind of life is unchristian. If I be a Christian I must think 
of others. I must care for them. I must see how I go through 
the world lest I stumble upon them. A Christian man is not only 
to abstain from deliberately rushing at a man to knock him down, 
but he is to be careful to keep himself from stumbling lest he fall 
against the man and knock him down. It seems to be this inof- 
fensiveness which is the characteristic described in the phrase of 
the apostle. 



ABOUT SHIPS. 



An ideal voyage between New York and Liverpool would be along 
a line represented by the curve made on a globe by the application 
of the edge of a ruler whose ends should touch both places. On a 
plane it would be called a straight line. But what ship ever made 
such a voyage? What ship could be so navigated as to never be 
turned from an absolutely direct course ? Such a result would re- 
quire the same condition of wind and wave at every point of the 
voyage. It would also require unerring readings of the nautical al- 
manac, the chart, the observations of the heavenly bodies, and the 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 449 

same continuous physical and mental condition of the navigator. 
The hand on the tiller that steers the vessel must never vary in nerv- 
ous and muscular conditions. If not among the certain impossibili- 
ties such a voyage must be ranked with the high improbabilities. 

If all the tackings and changes of a vessel making the longest voy- 
age between the places could be drawn on paper we should see a 
very remarkable picture, but it would be the picture of a vessel that 
had actually started from New York and had actually reached Liver- 
pool. That must not be forgotten. 

If we could have a similar picture of the real course of a vessel 
which had made the shortest trip, with all this vessel's deviations 
from a direct course, even that would show many angles made, many 
a compass of miles unnecessarily traversed, and therefore a longer 
voyage than the ideal. 

We have considered the deflections of a ship under government 
and possessing the equipment requisite for its guidance. Suppose a 
vessel without helm, without compass, and even without pilot, set 
out in the ocean, clear of land, on the direct line between New York 
and Liverpool, duly headed to the latter port, and left to wind and 
tide, all sails properly set. How many chances are there in a billion 
that such a ship would ever reach Liverpool ? 

Now, suppose an intermediate case : that of a ship with a pilot 
and a rudder but no compass, no chart, and no instrument for taking 
observations. She would be steered by guess and have all the chances 
of weather encountered by the other two. It is conceivable that she 
might be brought to the desired port. It is just possible ; not prob- 
able. If it did occur what a picture the lines of her courses would 
make on a map ! 

Are not men like ships upon the sea? 

Only one has made the ideal voyage from the port of birth to the 
haven of heaven, without deviation, without deflection, plowing 
through every wave, plowing through every storm, keeping straight 
on without pause. It was JESUS. 

When we look at all others we find that the stanchest, strongest, 
swiftest sailors of them all have made many a deviation and many 
a put-back, suffered many a deflection, although at last they have 
dropped anchor in the desired haven. The maps of the actual courses 



45 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

of such good ships as Abraham, Israel, David, Paul, and Peter are 
instructive to angels and to men. 

The result of a fair study of these would yield comfort to all hon- 
est Christian people who are bound for heaven. We are not all 
equally well-built for speed or strength. We encounter various 
weathers. Sometimes we are driven along the ideal line with cheer- 
ing rapidity. Sometimes we are driven back by disheartening storms. 
Often — O, how often ! — we are carried far north of our course or far 
south. Shall we ship the rudder? Shall we throw the chart and 
compass overboard and drift ? We know the doom that will follow 
that. 

No ! We will keep the faith and face the sea. We will work at 
the pumps when a leak is sprung. We will shift sails when needed. 
We are bound for heaven, and we are making headway, be it ever so 
little ! 

Such a study will correct our judgment and augment our chanty. 
That other craft, our brother Christian, is beaten about by many a 
wind, and is often, apparently, water-logged. But he heads toward 
heaven and gets on as best he can. Let us not despair of him nor 
unjustly criticise him. What a terrific lurch did David make ! 
What a fearful leak did Peter spring ! Through how many a fog 
did Paul make his way ! But they all dropped anchor " within 
the veil." 

But let no man have false hopes of hearing the bells on the coast 
of heaven ring his arrival there if he abandon his rudder, cast away 
his compass, resign himself to be carried hither and thither by every 
wind of doctrine and every hurricane of passion. He will go down 
at sea or be shipwrecked on some reef. " The hope of the hypocrite 
shall perish." 

Brethren, are we " headed " aright ? Are we toiling in the storm ? 
Let us keep heart. Suddenly the heavenly Pilot may board us. When 
we seem far off from land, immediately we shall reach the haven 
where we would be. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 45 I 

ADVANCING. 

We need more positiveness. We need the habit of standing by 
the things that are settled. To that end each man needs to have 
some things settled for himself. Then when they are settled he must 
cling to them, and not to things which are still in question or in 
doubt. 

The trend of modern thought and expression demands attention 
to this matter. The fashion of thought lately seems to be to regard 
that man the most " advanced " thinker who has thought out the very 
least. Men's abilities have been measured, not by what they know, 
but by what they do not know ; not by what they believe, but by 
what they doubt. A speaker who harangues on the difficulties which 
exist in matter and in mind will attract attention and elicit applause, 
while a teacher who instructs us in what is not difficult to compre- 
hend, but which is of inestimable value in practical life, is regarded 
as dull and ^advanced. 

This cant of "advanced" thinkers is leading multitudes into bogs, 
into impenetrable forests, into pitfalls. Men must " advance ! " That 
is the cry. But why? What is the use of always advancing ? May 
it not be well occasionally to stand still ? Certainly, unless you know 
what ground you are going to tread, you would better not move for- 
ward. 

By all means let us advance ; but let us advance along the ground 
which has been ascertained to be solid, and let us advance by methods 
which shall secure safety with progress. 

Let some things be regarded as settled. Surely, if the human race 
has been exercising its reason through so many ages, something must 
be settled, if reason be worth anything to man. There may be sub- 
jects which men will question in some places which no man of honor 
will question in another. In all Christian and Jewish households, 
pulpits, and publications, surely these things ought to be considered 
settled forever, not even to be reopened or discussed ; namely, that 
there is a God and Saviour ; that the Bible is the word of God, the 
rule of faith and practice ; and that man's moral nature is developed 
and purified by obedience to the word of God. The children in 

such households should no more discuss any one of these matters 
29 



452 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

than they should discuss the chastity of their mothers. The man 
who in the presence of members of such households treats any one 
of these subjects as not yet settled — if he is not a fool, destitute of 
all knowledge of what constitutes honor — is a base seducer. Within 
those bounds he who advances makes progress on secure ground ; 
but he who advances beyond those bounds falls over a precipice. 



DAVID'S SLEEP EXPERIENCE. 

In the third psalm there is a verse which, however superficially 
read, it is pleasant to hear: 

" I laid me down and slept. I waked, for the Lord sustained me." 

It is very easy for a Christian in ordinary circumstances to make 
that statement. Indeed, any man who believes in the superintend- 
ing providence of the good God might say those words ; but they 
have a peculiar significance as uttered by David, in his circumstances. 
It is to be remembered that the psalm was composed when he was 
fleeing from Absalom, his son. His enemies were multiplying. His 
friends appeared to be failing. There were many who said of his 
soul, " No help for him in God." But David trusted in God and 
prayed to the Lord, and felt sure that Jehovah heard him from his 
holy hill of Zion. To show the effect of this faith upon his mental 
and physical condition he uses three words which are very striking 
under the circumstances. 

He savs first, " I laid me down." The word used here in the orio-- 
inal denotes preparation and peace. He did not tumble down upon 
his couch, but he regularly prepared himself for bed and quietly lay 
down to sleep, as one does whose business has been completely fin- 
ished and who has no anxiety about the morning. 

His second word is, " I slept." It does not imply a mere catching 
of such sleep as a soldier may obtain through the night watches 
after a toilsome day — a slumber made torturous by his thoughts 
and broken by his anxiety. It was sleep ; God's gift of balm. It 
was not the heavy slumber of one who has cast himself into sleep 
as one might spring into a well till those who hunted him had passed 
by. This is indicated by what follows. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



453 



His third word is, "I waked." It does not signify a starting out 
of sleep as when one is frightened. It shows that he was not over- 
whelmed in a deep slumber. He went to bed at his regular hour. 
He took his natural, healthy sleep, and when that was finished he 
naturally awoke. The Lord had sustained him. 

This is a more beautiful and touching picture of the triumph of 
faith than we sometimes see in its more heroic aspects. When a 
man is engaged in action, pushing things about him and making 
things fly, even when surrounded by enemies, the very exertion in- 
creases his faith, but when, surrounded by hostile forces that are con- 
stantly increasing, a man has such trust in the Lord that his sleep is 
not invaded, when he can lie down in quiet like a baby in its mother's 
lap, and fall asleep in the arms of God, this is a triumph of faith that 
is beautiful indeed. What is there more valuable for life than that 
which brings healthy, natural sleep ? Our activities are good only as 
they bring about that state of fatigue which makes sleep sure and 
sweet. It is a triumph of faith that it can accomplish this. In times 
of peace many a man is so beset by the cares of business that unless 
he secures for himself a sufficiency of good and natural sleep he 
cannot keep his health and sustain himself in his work. Merchants, 
mechanics, lawyers, physicians, men of all professions and occupa- 
tions in this busy life, must sleep or be unfitted for their work. Bet- 
ter than all narcotics is simple trust in the sustaining, gracious prov- 
idence of the good God. In view of this a study of David's sleep 
experience will be profitable. 



THE "LARGE UPPER ROOM." 

When the evening was approaching on which our Lord was to 
eat the passover for the last time with his disciples he sent forward 
to Jerusalem two of them, honored Peter and John, to " make ready." 
He told them in advance that they should be so directed as to find 
" a large upper room, furnished " — that is, having divans, cushioned. 
" There make ready," said he. 

There may be something instructive for us in this latest economic 
direction of our Lord. He knew the solemnity of this feast He 



454 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

knew that he intended to substitute for it a eucharistic feast which 
should be perpetuated through the ages. He knew that he was ap- 
proaching his death. There had been no pomp in his life. He 
had not cultivated the aesthetic. He attached little importance to 
externals. But on this occasion there should be nothing mean — 
nothing that showed parsimony. He would have the best room in 
the house, a large upper chamber, where he should feast with his 
disciples without inconvenience and without distraction. 

We who are his followers in this later day of the world profess to 
give him invitations to be the guest of our lives. Do we prepare 
for him? Where is the large upper chamber? 

Let us look at our thoughts as at a house. What space we give to 
business ! There is plenty of room for plans and purposes and 
speculation. From morn until night, often almost all the night, 
sometimes much of the hallowed Sabbath day, there is space for 
bargaining, for buying, for selling, and for the investment of our 
gains. In some of us nearly the whole house is thus occupied, the 
remainder being given to plans for pleasures and enjoyment, for the 
advancement of our families in social rank, for our own social or po- 
litical advancement, for the claims which society has upon us, or 
which we acknowledge as the dues of " our party." In some of us 
every possible accommodation is made for our studies, for the culti- 
vation of our intellects, without any purpose to use the result for 
either the aggrandizement of ourselves or the advancement of 
the Redeemer's kingdom among men. What room is given to 
Jesus ? 

Let us look at our affections as a house. We love — how many 
things and persons we do love ! Some of us love more things than 
persons ; some of us more persons than things. Our parents, our 
wives, our husbands, our children, our kinsmen and friends, have the 
amplest room and the best. We warm at the thought of them ; we 
embrace, caress, and cherish them. Sometimes we go so far as to 
say, " I love you with my whole heart." The affections of some of 
us are given almost wholly to certain indulgences, legitimate pursuits 
and pleasures — legitimate until they engross us. Let us go through 
every room in our hearts and put the name of the occupant on the 
door. An angel going through would naturally expect to find Jesus 



FOR E I r ER Y FIRESIDE. 45 5 

in " the large upper room." But there is another name on that 
door. Where is Jesus? We thought he was somewhere in the 
house. We were sure that the examining angel would find him. It 
is true that we gave him no special room. We may have deceived 
ourselves in supposing that we had said, " Take. any room, Lord." 
But he is no such guest as to be indefinitely invited. In point of 
fact, we may not have set apart a single separate room. We have 
not been at pains to examine from day to day to see if he was in 
any room. And lo ! the angel does not find him. He would have 
come into " a large upper room, furnished." But that we could not 
spare, alas! even to Jesus. 

Consider the advantage of giving a large upper room to Jesus in 
the day. Some Christians plunge at once into the morning paper 
and then rush off to business, giving the latest hour in the day, the 
hour of bodily and mental exhaustion, to their devotional exercises. 
Try the other method. Give the first, the upper room, to spiritual 
exercises. Make it as large as you can. If needful, rise an hour or 
a half hour earlier. Let your papers and letters, however pressing, 
lie unopened. Have your Bible, your book of prayers, your hymn book, 
or some other collection of devotional poetry ; a little holy library to 
itself. Read prayerfully. You will be surprised to find how often, as 
if by some providential arrangement, you will come upon something 
which seems specially to have been written for your present state of 
mind. You will soon see how this exercise helps your mind to take up 
its business or intellectual problems for the day, and how this morn- 
ing serenity seems to help even your bodily health. The late Hon. 
William E. Dodge was for years a merchant prince in New York. 
He carried the heavy loads of large businesses, and it was his ad- 
hesion to the practice of giving at least one hour, and often more, 
the first of the day, to his books of devotion and to prayer, which is 
believed to have given him much of his elasticity and endurance. 
The Lord who had the " large upper room, furnished," sanctified 
all the smaller and lower departments of his house of life, and made 
it the " House Beautiful." 



45 6 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

SPIRITUAL DYSPEPSIA. 

Of all the ills that flesh is heir to dyspepsia is ordinarily regarded 
as one of the worst. It is not only a local distress, but a general 
misery. Its force of torment is not all spent upon the body ; it 
seems to reach the mind. A dyspeptic is gloomy, peevish, morose ; 
and if he do not show these characteristics it is because he is in 
constant effort to repress their symptoms. 

Spiritual dyspepsia bears a striking likeness to its physical twin- 
brother. A man who is spiritually a dyspeptic is spiritually weak 
and spiritually darkened ; and if he have any disposition to avoid 
reputation for these characteristics he is engaged in a constant ef- 
fort at self-repression. 

Bodily dyspepsia is very frequently produced by eating too 
rapidly and eating too much. The less a man masticates his food 
the larger amounts can he swallow, and the more-unchewed food 
enters his stomach the worse for the stomach and the worse for the 
whole man. The digestive organs commence their work under the 
disadvantage of having to discharge their own functions and at the 
same time the functions that ought to have been discharged by the 
saliva in slow eating. The consequence is that they do their own 
work insufficiently and must leave that of mastication undone. It 
will follow that there shall lie in the stomach a mass of undigested 
and indigestible matter, and this matter is got rid of by decomposi- 
tion, and this decomposition produces gases whose acridity dam- 
ages the finest portion of the stomach and superinduces much 
disease. 

Even where a man has paid sufficient attention to his eating it is 
absolutely necessary that he take a good degree of bodily exercise 
in order to keep the digestion in healthy operation ; for the intent 
of food is to supply those wastes of the body which are produced by 
action. The strength that a man derives from his food must be 
spent in physical motion. A wise man will study this adaptation 
and conform his habits to it. He will work his body as much as he 
should and eat no more than he ought. 

Spiritual dyspepsia is produced in the same way. Truth is the 
food of the spirit. The word of God is that truth. A man takes it 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 457 

for himself directly from the Bible, or from those who, having in 
them the truths of the Bible, are propagating those truths by speech 
or writing. Most Christian men receive their spiritual food from 
the pulpit. This food must be used just as the bodily food. It is 
not profitable to a man unless he can incorporate it with his spirit- 
ual constitution. Bread and meat must be assimilated into bone 
and flesh and nerve, to do the man any good. Whatever he takes, 
but does not assimilate, is an imposition upon his body. 

So with the word of God. That a man may be able inwardly to 
digest it he must take it slowly. By processes of the soul, which 
are similar to those of the teeth, he must prepare the spiritual food 
to be assimilated with his spiritual constitution. Then he must in- 
wardly digest it ; and then all the spiritual muscle, spiritual nerve, 
and spiritual vital force must be put into activity. This will cause 
the truth to produce its ultimate and intended effect. It will keep 
the spiritual constitution in good health and good play ; it will in- 
crease the hearty, wholesome hunger of the soul, and send it back 
to the bread of life and the waters of salvation with a keener relish 
and still sweeter enjoyment. 

The word of truth which we heard last Sunday we must be using 
all this week ; otherwise we shall return to the teachings of the 
pulpit spiritual dyspeptics, a very little portion of last Sunday's food 
assimilated, and a great portion lying in us decomposing and pro- 
ducing its acrid gases ; for if a man " hold a truth in unrighteous- 
ness," and do not use that truth, he will come to hate it. It will 
be, as it were, an undigested lump ; a perpetual distress ; he will 
fight against it, he will loathe it, he will desire to throw it off. Some- 
times a misused truth is worse than a very grave error ; for the error 
may be like an overdose of poison, which the spiritual stomach nat- 
urally and instinctively rejects. 

It is very clear in spiritual dyspepsia, as in physical dyspepsia, 
that the evil grows. A man may receive a truth readily, but may 
make no use of it in his practical life. He will find himself, there- 
fore, less ready to receive the next truth, as, when a man is in the 
beginning of dyspepsia, he finds his appetite commencing to grow 
capricious. 

There is no safety for any man but in the constant use in practical 



458 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

life of every truth he knows. If under the preaching of the sermon 
he is convinced that it is duty to pursue a certain course — a duty he 
had never seen before — and if he dally with his doubts and his old 
habits, he will become a spiritual dyspeptic, uncomfortable in himself 
and disagreeable to others. Mere theories of truth, however ortho- 
dox they may be, are of no avail unless they lead to practical good 
living. Only that man can be said to be perfectly healthy and of 
high Christian character who resolutely employs all his life in the 
active use of Christian truths which he has learned from the Bible 
and from the living minister. 

If every man in any congregation would spend six days of the 
week in doing just what his pastor taught on the last Sunday the 
whole congregation would return on the next with such a spiritual 
appetite that it would be absolutely delicious to feed them. The 
minister would be stimulated to find new food and stronger. Then, 
as each man worked, the practical Christianity of his life would have 
more power in drawing others to hear the word of God than all the 
chimes of all the bells in Christendom. And so in point of size, of 
spiritual strength, and of growing activity, that Christian congrega- 
tion would increase. 

There is no pleasure without health ; there is no health without 
right eating and proper activity. It is so in the body. It is so in 
the spirit. Spiritual dyspeptics lose almost all the pleasures of liv- 
ing and have almost all the pains ; for, as physical dyspepsia dark- 
ens the mind, spiritual dyspepsia injures the body. When David 
spoke of God as being the " health of his countenance " he uttered 
not only a high religious sentiment, but also a profound philosophic 
truth. It is easier for the soul to bear the ills of the flesh than for 
the flesh to sustain the ills of the soul. The spirit of man can 
bear his infirmities ; but a wounded spirit who can bear? 



"WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?" 

In the month of June, 1880, 1 was visiting a friend on Hampstead 
Hill, London. She had been one of my traveling companions in the 
Holy Land. Her home was charming, and her intimate friend and 



St \ ) ' 



i «li 



S tin 4 



«H 



L\ 







is 



J 















i 





. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 459 

neighbor, whom I had the pleasure of meeting, was Mrs. Charles, 
the writer of The Sckonberg-Cotta Family. My friend has a quiet way 
of doing good things, so that I dare not mention her name, and am 
afraid to say that she supports an orphanage, for fear this article fall 
into her hands. In that pleasant home of help, among other things, 
I saw the illuminated motto, "What would Jesus do?" I had 
never seen it before, and it greatly impressed me. That afternoon 
I was in the home of her rector, the Rev. Edward H. Bickersteth, 
known all over the Christian world as the author of " Yesterday, 
To-Day, and Forever," a poem perhaps oftener read than any other 
religious poem of similar length which has appeared since the days 
of John Milton's " Paradise Lost." I happened to mention the impres- 
sion the motto made on me, when Mr. Bickersteth said that he had 
written verses on the motto, as it had impressed him as it had me. 
At my request he was kind enough to read them to me, and at my 
solicitation presented me the original, which I preferred even to the 
copy Mrs. Bickersteth was kind enough to offer to make for me. I 
am glad that I did so, as I now have the opportunity of showing 
the appearance of the distinguished author's autograph. Mr. Bick- 
ersteth has since become the Lord Bishop of Exeter. 

Besides gratifying a natural curiosity the sight of the original 
poem will be a lesson of painstaking to young writers. 

The autograph is not so very plain that all can read it with ease. 
The following is the poem : 

When the morning paints the skies 

And the birds their songs renew, 
Let me from my slumbers rise, 

Saying, " What would Jesus do? " 

Countless mercies from above 

Day by day my pathway strew ; 
Is it much to bless thy love ? 

Father, " What would Jesus do ? " 

When I ply my daily task 

And the round of toil pursue, 
Let me often brightly ask, 

" What, my soul, would Jesus do ? " 



4 5o CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

Would the foe my heart beguile 

Whispering- thoughts and words untrue. 
Let me to his subtlest wile 

Answer, " What would Jesus do ? " 

When the clouds of sorrow hide 

Mirth and sunshine from my view, 
Let me, clinging to thy side, 

Ponder, " What would Jesus do ? " 

Only let thy love, O God, 

Fill my spirit through and through ; 

Treading where my Saviour trod, 
Breathing, " What would Jesus do ? " 

E. H. B. 
28 May 1880. 




THE EVENING LAMP 



im 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 463 



THE EVENING LAMP. 



INDIRECT INFLUENCE OF METHODISM. 

Methodist writers can point to a very great and growing direct in- 
fluence of Methodism upon the nations during the past century and 
show that that direct influence has been highly beneficial. If there 
were nothing else they could show the vast columns of statistics of 
those who have been gathered into the various Methodist organiza- 
tions, those who have been born of Methodist parents, and those 
who, on Methodist lines, have expended their whole lives in laboring 
for the spiritual advancement of mankind. 

Leaving that work to those who are Methodists the present writer 
simply designs to point out a few of the lines of the indirect influence 
of Methodism which seem to him to have made it the creditor of 
the whole of Christendom. 

The first of these is its political influence. We must remember 
that it began its work in England in the middle of the eighteenth 
century, when England was not making that progress toward the 
front of nations which has marked her career since the time that 
Methodism was fully and powerfully at work in Great Britain. In- 
deed, that country has scarcely had a darker period than that at 
which John Wesley providentially appeared upon the scene. There 
is probably no more powerful picture of that period than that painted 
by Buckle {History of Civilization in England, p. 107), in which there 
is shown the affliction which befell the country by the accesssion of 
George III., and the incubus which that reign of sixty years laid 
on the people. The king opposed everything good and patronized 
every thing bad. He discarded good and able men from his coun- 
cils, and surrounded himself by only those who, being already cor- 
rupt, were his tools, or by men whom he could corrupt, like William 
Pitt. He fastened slavery on Virginia, drove his ministers into a 
war with France, and saddled the country with a national debt so 
great that no thoughtful person supposes it will ever be able to pay. 
The House of Commons had become mainly a mob of "ignorant 



464 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

fox-hunting squires," and the House of Lords was lowered in its 
character by the numerous bad creations of peers made by the fatu- 
ous monarch. Every thing seemed going from bad to worse, and 
upon none did the burden fall more than upon the common people. 
And then came the French revolution ; a prodigious event, so appall- 
ing that it not only overturned thousands of smaller minds, but had 
such power as to overthrow even so noble an intellectual structure 
as that of Edmund Burke. 

It is to be remembered that, goodly and strong as is the structure 
of a government wholly administered by any aristocracy, however 
noble and cultivated, at last the mass of the people has the destiny 
of a kingdom in its own hands. They are like the fabled monster 
in the sea on which men " landed," mistaking it for an island. They 
built their fires and cooked their food and fell to junketing, all which 
had so small an impression on the sleeping monster that he did not 
move until the fire made him a little restless, when he turned over ! 
Now, a "turn over" is simply plain English for revolution. "When 
the people grow tired of us I suppose we must pack up our trunks," 
the present Prince of Wales is reported to have said. I suppose the 
prince was right. When the King of England and his ministers were 
perpetrating all possible political " fooleries " which made the case 
of the poor day-laborer, on farm or in mine, more and more doleful 
until it was becoming intolerable, and when under their burdens 
they were excited by the political events on the Continent, it was 
Methodism, with its intelligent theology, Methodism, with its prac- 
tical beneficences, Methodism, with its thrilling hymns, that enlight- 
ened the mind and saved the consciences and cheered the breasts of 
the wretched colliers and other lowly folks among whom it went; 
kindling the light of hope beneath the pall of darkness which lay 
upon the land, and lifting the thatched roof of the English peasant 
as high as heaven, so that he should look at the things which were 
invisible until the things which were seen could be borne because 
they were temporal. 

When the future scientific and philosophical historian comes to 
the final analysis of English things in the last quarter of the eight- 
eenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth century he will find that 
it was Methodism which providentially prevented such a turn-over of 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 465 

the people as would have overturned the British throne, and that 
England owes more to her Weslcys and their Methodists than to 
her Wellingtons and their armies. 

If we turn to the American colonies just before and just after they 
became the new United States we find that one of the most impor- 
tant elements of success would have been wanting if there had not 
been some mode of intercommunication between the different and 
distant parts of a sparsely-settled country in which there were no 
railroads and no telegraphs. Would not all the hard-won fruits of 
Washington's campaigns have been lost if it had not been for the 
" men on horseback," the itinerant preachers, who went from New En- 
gland to the Carolinas? They were the connecting links. They 
passed from the north through the seat of government to the south, 
and back over the same routes. They preached the Gospel in the 
thin settlements, keeping the people cheered with the religious 
hopes, and, before falling asleep at night, told in the settler's cabin 
all they had heard in their journeyings. They were, generally uncon- 
sciously but not the less surely, the unifying element of American 
society. When a government was to be formed, these itinerants, not 
at all intent on political matters, passing rapidly hither and yon, were 
the shuttles that shot the woof of their new religion into the warp 
of the new political organization, and so made a fabric which now 
has endured both the wear and the tear of a hundred years. Amer- 
ica probably owes as much to the band of first Methodist itinerants 
as to the men who marched to Valley Forge. In poetic and historic 
justice, perhaps, in the rotunda of the national Capitol the com- 
panion picture to Washington's Farewell to his Generals should be 
Asbury's Ordination to the Episcopacy. [And yet to Asbury not 
one line is given in the Encyclopedia Britannica /] 

The indirect influence of Methodism on literature has yet to re- 
ceive its due estimate. Mr. W r esley's incessant writing, compiling, 
abridging and translating and publishing of books, large and small, 
religious and merely literary, is generally known. But one should 
trace the effect produced on literature generally by the distribution 
of books which he was able to effect by his system of lay-preaching 
and itinerancy. How many young British and American minds his 
books quickened who can tell ? But it is not difficult to see that to 



4 66 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

Methodism we owe a great cheapening of books and diffusion of 
printed matter, as well as mental quickening and the sharpening of 
the appetite for literature. There will be found by the critical his- 
torical student a link between Wesley's book-room at City Road 
Chapel and the great publishing houses at St. Paul's Church-yard, 
London, and 150 Nassau Street, and the Harpers' establishment on 
Franklin Square, to say nothing of the extensive operations of the 
specially Methodist publishing houses in London, New York, and 
Nashville. It will be found that these latter are not only post but 
propter. The very name Wesley gave his infant establishment, the 
first religious publishing institution in the world, is significant. It 
was the " Book Room!' Very exact, for the whole business could be 
at first conducted in a single small room in a small house. See to 
what proportions in the past century from Wesley's germ has grown 
the tree of religious publishing, whose leaves are for the healing of 
the nations. It is suggested that some one make a list of the books 
written by men who are not claimed by Methodism, but who, like 
Lord Macaulay, had in early youth the inspiration and stimulus of 
Methodist homes. 

The indirect influence of Methodism on theology is sufficient 
subject for a whole treatise, which I trust some scholar, having the 
requisite leisure and ability, will sometime write. The theology of 
Methodism is not that of high Calvinism, on the one hand, nor is it 
that of the Arminianism which was the theology of the Dutch Re- 
monstrants in the sixteenth century. The latter was a reaction from 
the former. All that is true in both is preserved, while all that is 
false in either is rejected by the Methodist theology. 

The extreme Calvinism which looks at everything from the sove- 
reignty side of God, and the extreme Arminianism which looks at 
every thing from the freedom side of man, both lead to great errors, 
while both have for basis the revealed truth of God. The theology 
which can formulate all that and only that which the Bible reveals 
has for centuries been the want of the world. The most ardent 
Methodist would hardly claim that the earliest Methodist theolo- 
gians, including Mr. Wesley, did that much; but must not every 
impartial mind who has traced Methodist scholarship admit that the 
contributions of the Methodist writers through the last century to 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 467 

this most desirable result surpass those which have come from all 
other quarters? 

And so it has come to pass that in circles considered Calvinistic 
the theology held by many is neither Calvinistic nor Arminian, but 
Methodistic. The influence of Methodist culture is extending among 
scholars. They reach the result by their personal investigations. 
Every new recasting of theologic metal is run in Methodist molds. 
The late Congregational Creed, in so far as it is an improvement, ap- 
proaches the form of Methodist — not Arminian — theology. When 
the " Confession of Faith " of the great and glorious Presbyterian 
Church shall come under revision those who are alive then are noti- 
fied that it will be an interesting study to compare the old and the 
new confessions with what shall then be considered the standards of 
Methodist theology. 

Ecclesiastically Methodism has had a very powerful influence. It 
has been a growingly impressive rebuke to all the claims of high 
churchliness while it has shown the great advantage of a strong or- 
ganization. So it has come to pass that both by dogma and custom, 
by doctrine and discipline, Methodism has trained men for every de- 
partment of the holy catholic Church, while setting an example of 
zeal which has inflamed the Churches. More than twenty years ago 
I was accompanied by the local servant of an American gentleman 
in Geneva to see the chapel in which at that time the historian, 
Merle D'Aubigne, was preaching. Asking this valet what manner of 
man might be this " Dr. Merle," as they called him, he replied in 
French that he was "nothing but a Methodist." "A Methodist? 
A Methodist? Well, what can that be?" I innocently asked. "O, 
he preaches as if he believed every word he said was true," was the 
reply. By taking the work of the Christian ministry out of the pro- 
fessions and preaching out of the conventionalities and yet main- 
taining the force and the fire of convictions that are reasonable, 
Methodism has warmed all the Churches into what Dr. Chalmers 
has called " Christianity in earnest." 

Not only has Methodism reached over and dropped blessings into 
neighboring communions, but it has sent messengers to the sur- 
rounding sects. Fifty pastors of the Reformed Church of France 
were furnished by Methodism. To-day I look around this city of 



4 68 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

New York and see those who were Methodists at work in the other 
Churches. There is the venerable Dr. Armitage at the Fifth Avenue 
Baptist Church, the earnest Dr. Watkins at the Protestant Episcopal 
Church of the Holy Trinity, the genial Dr. Collier at the Unitarian 
Church of the Messiah, the learned Dr. Marvin at the Presbyterian 
Church of the Covenant, the industrious Mr. Crafts at another Pres- 
byterian Church, the philosophic Dr. Rylance at the old Episcopal 
Church of St. Mark's, to say nothing of him who has the independent 
pulpit of the Church of the Strangers — all sons of Methodism, al- 
though now led providentially aside, as Mr. Wesley was in regard to 
the establishment — all honoring Methodism, loving her, and praying 
that her earthly history may cover many centuries, and her influence, 
direct and indirect, be spreading through eternity. 
1882. 



" BAD NEW YORK," 

The reputation of this metropolis in the rural districts is not good. 
Even some of the old residents sometimes speak disparagingly oi 
their own city. But this, I think, is the common fate of capitals. 
In Great Britain it is " Bad London." In Germany it is " Bad 
Berlin." In France it is " Bad Paris." 

Well, New York is not good, but, so far as I know, it is as good 
as any other place in America. 

Visitors report a place as they have seen it. A man went to a 
town, with letters to the best families, had a warm welcome, en- 
joyed cultivated society, saw only the brightest part of the place, 
and went away with the impression that it was a little Eden. Dur- 
ing his stay, at the same moment, there was a forlorn traveler at 
the inn who had lost his money and had his baggage distrained to 
pay for his lodging, and left the town, on a dismal, rainy day, with 
the feeling that it was so wretched a place that he trusted he 
should never behold it again. 

We take from things what we bring to them. A man may come 
to New York, stay at a hotel of bad reputation, spend his days 
among sharpers and rogues, his evenings at the theater, and a large 
portion of his nights at the other houses of ill-fame, and go off, 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 469 

representing New York as a Gomorrah of wickedness. Another 
man, visiting the city at the same time, finds morning prayer in 
many a church and noon-day prayer in the very heart of business, 
and Lenten lectures delivered by earnest clergymen to large and 
serious congregations ; finds Young Men's Christian Associations, 
mission chapels, great public gatherings to promote large philan- 
thropic and religious designs, and every single hour of the day 
athrob with work, and goes away feeling as if he had been dwelling 
in the very suburbs of the New Jerusalem. 

It is of the nature of great cities to intensify, not to say aggra- 
vate, all the elements they contain. A mean man will become 
meaner in the city ; but a great man will become greater. The 
feeble waste away more rapidly in a city; but the strong wax 
stronger. The heat of the crowd inflames the passions of the bad 
and kindles the zeal of the good. Therefore when we come to 
sit in judgment on a city we are to consider all its characteristics 
together. Taking some sections of .the inhabitants, we might be 
compelled to say that they are worse than any proportionate num- 
ber of similar people in a smaller town or in a rural district ; but if 
that be true, on the other hand the liberal people are larger hearted, 
working Christians are far more active, and the true philanthropists 
are far more self-sacrificing than a proportionate number of similar 
men in a smaller town. 

It would be just as unfair to say "Good New York," thus lifting 
it above all the other places in the country, as to say "Bad New 
York," sinking it below the other places. New York is neither 
worse nor better than other places. There is only more of every 
thing in it. If I should render a verdict of the city only from my 
personal intercourse with the inhabitants I should say it was the 
best place on earth I had lived in ; and yet that would be exceed- 
ingly unfair to other towns where I have had my residence. They 
have been smaller. I am personally acquainted with more good, 
refined, cultivated, wise, active, liberal people in the city of New 
York than the entire population of any other town in which I have 
lived since I attained my majority. That should not blind my 
judgment to the fact of the wickedness of the criminal classes. In 

making judgment I must take all together. 
30 



47o 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



On the other hand, the city is not to be damned with a single 
epithet, by a judgment founded upon an inspection of those evils 
which exist in the human heart every-where and are simply aggra- 
vated by the very multitudinousness of a city population. . 

People abroad judge New York very much by our newspapers. 
They see crime after crime reported, with their details of horror re- 
cited at large, and comments and controversies thereupon ensuing, 
until a decent stranger might well be as much afraid to cross the 
ferry and walk our streets as to trust himself to the inhabitants of 
a cannibal isle. 

But with regard to the newspapers it must be remembered that 
they publish what is sensational because the one single, solitary rea- 
son for publishing a daily paper is to make money. The editors, 
therefore, feel bound to produce a marketable article ; and it is be- 
cause they know that readers in the quiet towns and rural districts 
will snatch up and read with avidity picturesque descriptions of 
the horrors of crime that column after column of such matter is 
printed. 

A drunken ruffian slays a citizen, it may be his father or wife. 
He is tried over and over; money and family influence are used 
in his behalf; and all this makes a great stir in the newspaper world. 
In the meantime ten thousand acts of mercy, as radiant in the sight 
of God as the homicide was hateful, are performed throughout the 
city, and not a single line in a single daily paper commemorates 
these beautiful deeds. 

Whenever country readers hear of the badness of New York let 
them remember that there are men and women and children, by 
the hundreds and thousands, doing works of charity that have no 
memorial except in the thought of God. Let them think of the 
Howard missions, the Sunday-schools, the newsboys' lodgings, the 
Sisters of the Stranger, and various other sisterhoods ; the Guild 
of St. John and various other brotherhoods ; the Young Men's 
Christian Association and various other benevolent societies of 
men ; of St. Luke's and the various other hospitals. 

Why, I have some knowledge of twenty-three societies to relieve 
the poor, seventeen to help children, eleven asylums for the aged, 
three for women, three for the blind, three for deaf mutes, two for 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 47 1 

lunatics, one for inebriates, and one for soldiers, besides fifty-two 
other benevolent societies, sustained by Israelites and Christians, 
not counting Bible societies, evangelical alliances, tract societies, 
temperance societies, Sunday-school societies, young men's and 
young women's Christian associations, city missions, education 
societies, dispensaries, homes, hospitals, and industrial schools, 
and not including orphan asylums, training schools for Christian 
workers, and the great parent societies of the several Churches. 
When you call this city " Bad New York " recollect these, and the 
many thousands of individual charities daily dispensed. I know 
men who, through me, " do good by stealth and blush to find it 
fame." All this is in " Bad New York." 



STREET-BEGGING. 

" Ye have the poor always with you," said the great Teacher. 
There never has been a time, in any nation, when this was not true. 
Is it likely that anywhere, at anytime, it will not be true? Even 
a superficial view of society will show that there are those who are 
really poor without blame. There are those who, for causes for 
which they are not responsible, and which they would gladly re- 
move if they could, are not able, by any exertion in their power to 
make, to procure what is really needed. No political economy has 
been able to remove this social element, no religious culture has 
been able to eliminate it. It would seem as if the saying of the 
great Teacher, with which this article opened, not only stated a 
fact, but also announced a general law of human society. 

But there are the " poor " and the " paupers." All paupers may 
be poor, but all poor are not paupers. There are those among the 
poor who areas gifted, as learned, as refined, as noble, as self-respect- 
ing, and as respectable as their richest fellow-citizens. A rich man 
may be rich because he is honorable, and a poor man may be poor 
because he is honorable. It shows a lack of knowledge, either of 
human society or of the English tongue, to say of any one that " he 
is poor, but honest." 

But paupers are ordinarily poor people whose poverty is due to 
themselves, and might be avoided if they were what they ought 



472 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

to be, and what, therefore, they might be. The word " ordinarily M 
is used because it is possible to conceive cases in which certain poor 
fall into the class of paupers for want of a delicacy which, perhaps, 
it would be too much to expect of them. Almost all beggars are 
paupers — not all, for some occasionally beg who cannot otherwise 
relieve their poverty ; but probably ninety-nine of every hun- 
dred beggars prefer beggary to work ; to even such work as they 
could perform — such work as is performed by many of those very 
persons from whom they solicit aid. 

Let it be borne in mind that the worthy poor are to be helped 
and the unworthy are to be cured. Let it also be recollected that 
the worthy poor almost never beg, and that out of every thousand 
beggars infesting the streets and visiting the houses of cities proba- 
bly not more than one is a proper subject for alms. All this may 
sound very harsh to those good souls who say to themselves that, 
having the comforts of life, it would be wicked in them to refuse a 
dime to a brother man who is in want, and who also say that it 
were better to help nine unworthy than suffer one worthy to go un- 
helped. But is it " help " ? The gist of the question lies there. 
If a man prefer begging to work, and you keep him from work and 
at begging, are you " helping" that man? Are you not injuring 
that man and the whole community? 

Street-beggars play on the feelings of those who are kindly dis- 
posed, and they understand the art of approaching good people on 
" the blind side/' They form a fraternity, bound together by cer- 
tain ties of mutual helpfulness in their " business " and by certain 
signs which enable them to co-operate. If these men applied the 
same abilities with the same industry in lawful pursuits they would 
make a legitimate livelihood. But they will not work. Nevertheless, 
they base their appeals usually on the ground that they cannot get 
work. They find you when they believe you have no employment 
for them, and then — " if they could only get work ! '' They know 
what will pass in your mind, and that finally you will give them 
money because you cannot give them work and cannot bear to 
turn away a fellow man who is hungry and who does not seem to 
have the means of winning bread. But if you will make some little 
contrivance in your house which, while it is wholly unproductive, 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 473 

seems to have the semblance of work, and offer these men pay, you 
will soon discover the real state of the case. 

A number of examples of this kind are known, but only two will 
be given, and the reader may be sure that they are perfectly au- 
thentic. A gentleman of high character and great generosity, who 
has a large manufacturing establishment in the city of New York, 
conducted his business where it was very easy of access to beggars. 

They so interfered with his work and wrought upon his feelings 
that he had recourse to the test of giving the applicants apparent 
employment. On the floor on which was his counting-room he 
had a pump erected in full view of his desk. He did not need the 
pump. The water which was drawn ran off unused ; but still it 
was some work to draw the water. As each beggar came and was 
told he should work for his living his pathetic reply was to the effect 
of " O, if I could only find work ! " The pump was immediately 
proffered, and pay at a rate which would procure a night's lodging 
for an hour's work. He was told that he could have that work 
every day until he found other employment. The suffering appli- 
cant was much obliged, but in one case he had a lame hand, and in 
another he had a friend at the door whom he must dismiss, so that 
he should not be kept waiting during the hour ; but it seemed to take 
all the rest of the day to dismiss the " friend," as the applicant never 
came back. In other cases there were other excuses, and the up- 
shot of the experiment was that, while a few accepted an hour's 
work at good pay, there was only one man who returned the second 
morning, and he never came back again. 

" The Sisters of the Stranger " is an organization of ladies con- 
nected with the " Church of the Strangers " in New York. They 
do not so much furnish money as look after strangers, giving advice, 
helping in emergencies, protecting strangers from imposition, etc. 
But they do both give and lend money, as in their judgment is best. 
Some months ago the lady in charge had much writing on hand for 
the church, for the " Sisters of the Stranger," and for the " American 
Institute of Christian Philosophy," whose summer-school was ap- 
proaching, and whose secretary she was helping. There came in an 
able-bodied man, who seemed to have some culture ; but, according 
to his account, he could not find work enough to procure him a 



4;4 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

meal. The lady asked him to write his name. It was well done. 
She then proposed to give him good pay for making a number of 
copies of a circular then in hand. He sat down to his work, not 
very graciously, and, after having worked about twenty minutes, 
doing about half the lady did in the same time, he received ample 
remuneration, but said, as he handed the papers to the lady : 
"Well, this is too humiliating! I'll never ask for help again." Yet 
the next morning the lady had occasion to visit her pastor, and 
found that same man at the door. He had come to beg food. 

By all means now known, and to be hereafter discovered, this 
class of men must be taught that it is not true that the world owes 
them a living, as they are so fond of repeating, but that it is true 
that every man owes the world work, and that if he will not pay this 
just debt he is a scoundrel, and, so far from being an object of 
commiseration, is a subject for punishment. This evil is so great 
that all good men and women should unite to make every practi- 
cable exertion for its cure. 

In this article a few suggestions are made, some of which may be 
adopted by each reader : 

i. Let the teaching in all our schools and churches go to the root 
of the matter. Every human being should be taught that he is 
born debtor, not creditor, to humanity; that in entering upon 
life he enters upon the enjoyment of a great estate laid up by fore- 
gone generations ; that he is under a debt which can be paid only 
to the generations which succeed him, and that this can be done 
only by doing all he can for the generation in which he exists. It 
must be shown that the possession of great wealth excuses no one. 
The sons of the rich should feel their responsibility. The " gilded 
youth " of the avenue, the daintily-dressed young fellows who go 
months without a day of mental or manual labor, should be made 
to feel that they are the frilled " tramps " at one end of society, and 
no more to be respected by thoughtful men than the shirtless 
" tramps " at the other end. Indeed, it will be well to stir the con- 
sciences of the men who spend whole days in utter idleness, or 
sauntering, or gazing vacantly from the windows of our fashionable 
club-houses, by agitating among them the question how far they 
are responsible for the street-beggars who are often asking them- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 475 

selves the question why they should not be fed without work, 
seeing that their genteel brothers do not work and yet fare 
sumptuously. 

2. Let each resident of a city make himself acquainted with the 
societies already existing for the relief of the necessities of various 
classes, arid as each applicant comes let him be sent to the institu- 
tion provided for his case. The resident of New York, for instance, 
should examine the City Registry for " Asylums and Homes," 
and for " Societies," Trow's City Directory. There are columns 
of names of organized and operative societies, covering almost all 
conceivable cases of need and of suffering. If the applicant will not 
be helped by any of these then he proclaims his unfitness for private 
beneficence. 

3. Let each citizen select some society which has an arrangement 
for visiting and examining cases. To that special society let him 
send those who apply to him, stating frankly that he does not give 
pecuniary aid to any who are not known to him. The result will 
be that those who are willing to have their cases examined will 
apply to the society designated, and those who ought not to receive 
money aid will not apply ; and, more than that, they will commu- 
nicate to their whole tribe such information as will keep them from 
making application ; and, still more, the society will be aided in car- 
rying forward its work of practical and judicious beneficence. This 
can be done by having in your pocket a card with the name of the 
society upon it, and then when you are accosted on the street you 
need lose no time ; you simply tell the applicant to carry that card 
to the place designated, and all will be right. Probably, in a majority 
of cases, the card will be thrown away. But let it be remarked 
that any man of means who regularly sends his applicants for help to 
a society to whose treasury he has not contributed is on a moral 
level with the man who habitually draws checks upon a bank in 
which he has no deposits. 

4. Every good citizen should give some time to the attentive con- 
sideration of the poor who come under his own immediate observa- 
tion. This he owes to himself. A rich man may set apart thou- 
sands of dollars annually to the maintenance of a corps of judicious 
and faithful investigators, who should distribute wisely to the poor 



4/6 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

tens of thousands of dollars of his wealth, and yet, if he do not put 
himself in brotherly communication with some poor man, deserving 
or undeserving, and strive by friendly advice and help to lift him 
to a self-supporting plane, he will lose all that blessedness which is 
promised to him that " considereth " the poor (Psa. xli, i), and that 
reward which comes to him that "pitieth " the poor (Prov. xix, 17). 
It is to be observed that the word in the first of these passages 
means to act wisely toward the poor, and the word in the second 
means to behave graciously toward the poor, neither of which is 
complied with by mere money gifts ; nor can any man, by pecuniary 
gifts, purchase exemption from the duty indicated in these words. 
Moreover, it will be instructive to follow up the people who appeal 
to you on the street or come to your house for cold victuals. Not 
long ago a woman was in the work-house, leaving her two little sons 
outside, the younger only three and the elder only seven years of age, 
who were compelled by several dissipated women to collect food and 
money for them, the money being spent by the women for liquor. 
Every child-beggar should be followed up. In most cases it would 
be found that the circumstances of these children called for the 
intervention of the " Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Chil- 
dren." In many cases they will not allow you to accompany them ; 
they are so early trained to roguery that they will escape from you 
while seeming to be conducting you to their houses. Strangers in 
the city should make it a rule never to give on the streets, however 
pitiable the story and moving the appeal. The great majority of all 
beggars on our streets are " professional." They know whether you 
are from New England, or the South, or the West, or from a foreign 
country. They will catch you just when it will seem most heartless 
to deny them ; for instance, late at night. 

5. All good citizens should unite in seeing that wise laws are 
framed and promptly enforced against mendicancy, to the execution 
of which every man should be willing to contribute time and effort, 
as well as money. To every man who says, " I would work if I could 
get work to do," should be given the reply of a house provided, 
to which he should be compelled to go, and where he would find 
some work which he should be compelled to do. The product of 
the work probably would not meet the expenses of the establish- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 477 

ment, but the balance could be procured by enlisting the interest of 
philanthropic men of means. 

In discussions of this complex and important subject it is always 
to be borne in mind that what it is desirable to vacate is not the 
poverty of the poor nor the correlative burden-bearing of the rich. 
Neither of these is intolerable. Neither of these is hurtful to the 
individual or to society. Pauperism is that which hurts society at 
large, by diminishing the general wealth and by injuring the char- 
acter of the individual. What must we do to eliminate that which 
produces pauperism ? First, we must abstain from every thing 
which tends to offer a premium to those who are willing to live off 
the toil of others ; and, second, w T e must strive to destroy that will- 
ingness in individual cases by moral reform. 

The worthy poor will always remain ; but the poor who have the 
greatest claim upon our regard will never beg. They will perish in 
silence. These must be found. We must so cultivate our spiritual 
and moral senses that we shall become quick to detect the needs of 
others and swift to relieve. That class we should have no wish to 
put out of human society. 

The unworthy poor are to be helped as well, but differently. 
Money is not help to them. They need moral culture. It is our 
duty to impart it to them ; but it is a difficult duty to perform. 
Most pastors in the city will probably tell you that they can more 
easily obtain hundreds of dollars from their prosperous parishioners 
to scatter among the poor than they can persuade one parishioner 
to give one afternoon in exerting moral influence over the vicious 
portion of the community. 

The third class, the thriftless and incompetent, are the most dif- 
ficult to deal with. Patient instruction is what they need. But it 
is so irksome for a man of robust and energetic character to tolerate 
those who are born inefficient. He succeeds ; why should not they? 
This is the question which the successful ask. He who has never 
had any sickness can have no conception of the burden which that 
man bears who has a secret malady or a perpetual invisible weak- 
ness ; much less can he have sympathy. As it is with the body, so 
is it with the character. Wherefore we are taught by the highest 
authority that, " we that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of 



4 ;8 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

the weak, and not to please ourselves " (Rom. xv, i). Life will never 
be without its burdens, and to all classes comes the apostolic injunc- 
tion, " Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ " 
(Gal. vi, 2). And " the law of Christ " is the highest law known in 
theoretical ethics and in practical good living. 



INTENTIONS. 

In regard to the effect of the intention upon the act, occasionally 
there are heard in business and in social circles utterances which seem 
to betray moral haziness, if not ethical darkness. 

It is assumed that if the intention be right the act cannot be 
wrong. The truth is that he who performs an act which he knows 
to be wrong has no right to go behind the act to his intention. Inten- 
tions are known to God alone; by men they are to be judged from 
the act. A man's assertion that his intention was good when the 
act is known to be wicked is of no avail. Who can tell whether he 
speaks the truth or not ? A man is known to have stolen some- 
thing. He declares his intention was good ; but a man who will steal 
will lie. 

Defense from intention is available only in neutral acts. When- 
ever an act may be either good or bad according to modifying cir- 
cumstances, then the intention of the performer may be his justifica- 
tion. The making of a certain chemical combination may be good 
or bad ; that will depend upon the intention. If the maker intends 
a medicine to heal a sick man the act is good. If he intends an 
insidious poison wherewith to take life unlawfully, it is bad. The 
taking of human life itself is a neutral act ; it may be done accident- 
ally and have no moral color ; it may be done intentionally, and then 
be right in one case and wrong in another. There the intention 
comes in, so that, unless the clause in the indictment which charges 
" malice aforethought " be established the indictment falls, although 
the taking of life be proved or even admitted. The reason for this 
is that life may be taken intentionally without malice and without 
fault, as when a criminal is executed. 

A man is getting himself on dangerous ground when he gives 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 479 

more study to his intentions than to the morality of his acts. The 
latter is the first thing to be settled. " Is what I do right ? " When- 
ever an act is known to be wrong in itself no intentions can justify 
it. There are some departments in ethical action in which there is 
no controversy among people making any pretensions to morality. 
For instance, it is wrong to steal ; it is wrong to commit adultery ; 
it is wrong to speak falsely against another ; no intentions are to be 
considered in these cases whatever. For any act of the kind a man 
should not make defense ; he should seek forgiveness. 

It is in the first of these, namely, in the violation of the command- 
ment, " Thou shalt not steal," that business men are mainly inter- 
ested. Stealing consists in any use of another man's property not 
authorized by him. A corporation official having charge of funds 
which are to be expended only according to a certain provided 
method is a thief if he uses any portion of that money in any way 
without the authority of the corporation. This is true wherever 
there is trust made by either corporation or individuals. It is also 
true of the use of another's property, however a man may have 
acquired control of it, whether by its being intrusted or otherwise. 
All talk of intentions in these cases is not only illogical, but also 
very misleading and very demoralizing. When a man who performs 
such acts can be talked of as " a good fellow " then begins the dis- 
ruption of society by the destruction of confidence. The man who 
betrays trust, who misappropriates funds committed to him for a 
specific purpose, is worse than the man who steals a loaf of bread 
intending to pay for it afterward. 

If the treasurer of a company use for a single hour a thousand 
dollars, or any other amount, without direction of the owner, and 
put that money back at the end of the hour, and no human being 
knows that he " borrowed " those funds, that man is a thief. He 
stands in the sight of God just as he would stand in the sight of 
man if any mishap befell him and he could not replace the property, 
and so was detected. No doubt that in business circles there are 
thousands of such cases ; but those men ought to be made to know 
that they are dishonest. They have fallen into the devil's trap with 
many other souls. They have managed to get out without detec- 
tion before the trap is held up to the public so that all eyes can see 



480 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

those who have not been able to make their escape. It certainly is 
the devil's trap, because so many men go into it in the hope of com- 
ing- out but never make their exit. When the funds are abstracted 
that is a fact, a thing- done. The replacing is subject to so many 
contingencies that a large number of men slip and are lost. It is 
to be impressed upon every man's conscience that even should he 
replace the money he is a thief. He has stolen ; he is as much a thief 
as if discovered. If that were universally understood how much 
crime would be avoided ! 

There was a case of a man who stole bread, not for his own use, 
but to feed the hungry, and with all the benevolence he was so dull 
of perception as not to perceive that he was a thief. 

A young priest, so soon as he was satisfied that any man or woman 
was holy, would put that person to death by a peculiar instrument 
which could penetrate the heart without leaving a sign. His inten- 
tion was to take saints out of mortal trouble and put them in im- 
mortal glory. He did not perceive that he was a murderer. 

A Protestant clergyman in trust of church funds took a portion 
and used it for the purpose of assisting in the building of churches. 
With another portion he speculated in stocks, expecting to make so 
much from the stocks as to replace the church funds so that it would 
do all the good possible to it originally, and he could do the addi- 
tional good to the churches helped. He did not perceive that 
he was a thief. The stocks went down on his hands and a discovery 
was made. His father died with a broken heart. He was degraded 
from his ministry by his Church, not for buying and selling stocks, 
but for using money committed to him which he had no right for 
one single minute to use for any other purpose than that for which 
it was contributed. 

Since the above was written I have had a letter from the super- 
intendent of a Sunday-school, from which the following is an extract : 

" My zeal in the matter of building the church has been so over- 
powering that I have even been tempted in the spirit of humble 
trust and much prayer to do that which is (considered) wrong, that 
I might thereby do good, to wit : I took $500 and consecrated it to 
the Lord, and asked him to direct the wheels of fortune, as might be 
for the best in its investment in the Louisiana State Lottery. I 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 481 

asked that if it could be consistent with God's will I might draw 
enough to build the church. I lost the $500, and believe that the 
Lord so directed." 

This man who gambles for religion can dare to ask God's blessing 
on an act so nefarious that if known to his Church he would be de- 
prived of his office. Why not plan to rob a bank and ask God to 
pardon the burglary? And with such morality this man is set to 
lead a Sunday-school ! 



ANONYMOUS LETTERS. 



It seems impossible for a right-minded man to conceive of any 
circumstances which can justify the writing of an anonymous letter. 

Any communication is intended to give pleasure or pain or mere 
information. Under any circumstances can a manly person of 
even semi-average intelligence be brought to write such a letter 
without signing his name to it? If he means to give pleasure he 
must know that any pleasant feeling the kind words may excite in 
the heart of the recipient will be alloyed by at least a curiosity to 
know who feels so kindly toward him. If it is intended to give 
pain it is a most cowardly thing. A man who would write such 
a letter is at heart an assassin. 

It is absurd to attempt to convey information in this way. No 
man of sense will act upon a statement made without an authorita- 
tive name. How does he know but that it may be a trap? He 
knows that the writer is a sneak even if he be friendly. A man who 
receives information that is of any importance desires to ascertain 
from his informant how he came to know it ; and then the recipient 
of the information takes it in with many another thing he knows, 
and that starts a series of questions, the answers to which might be 
given by his informant and be actually more valuable than the in- 
formation originally conveyed. 

It is not wise to attempt to correct an error by an anonymous 
letter. Perhaps it is not an error. Perhaps if you were face to face 
with the person you are attempting to correct you would find that 
you, yourself, are laboring under a misapprehension. 



482 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

We are told that ministers very often receive such letters, lectur- 
ing them roundly for having said things they never uttered. Some 
reporter's misapprehension, some printer's omission of the word 
" not " from a, sentence, makes some person feel that he must take 
the minister to task and lecture him. What an absurdity this is ! 
No man will write an anonymous letter who is not devoid either of 
intelligence or honor. It is just such senseless individuals who un- 
dertake, in anonymous letters, to lecture decent men. Now no 
man who has sense and self-respect pays any regard to such com- 
munications. It is not in their behalf this editorial is written. But 
these lines may fall into the hands of some young person who has 
never considered the question, and as we have been requested to 
set forth our view of the ethics in the case we have done so. A 
recent painful suicide of a woman within two blocks of our dwelling, 
a catastrophe brought on by malicious anonymous letters, gives 
some energy to our expressions. 

We have been shown several such letters. We recall one that 
was addressed to a clergyman, rating him soundly for something he 
had been reported in the newspaper to have said, which the good 
man had never spoken. He was lectured as if he were an arrant 
hypocrite, although for years he has been one of the most laborious 
of our most distinguished American clergymen. 

Newark, New Jersey, has the affliction of having such a mis- 
creant as one of its inhabitants, and the thorough-paced hypocrite 
signed himself, " One who feels his responsibilities." It was laugha- 
ble to see such a signature put to a letter which the writer dared 
not own to his fellow-men. We once saw another addressed to a 
clergyman, in which he was advised to pay his debts, with a kind of 
threat of some exposure if he did not. The good man had been 
keeping house in this city for years; was accustomed to pay all his 
bills monthly, and stated that at that time he owed simply ten dollars 
beyond his current butcher's and baker's bills, and nothing was due 
until the end of the month, so closely had he paid up his debts, as 
he is in pecuniary circumstances which make him much easier than 
most of his brethren. This letter was signed, " A member of your 
church." That was true or false. If false, the writer was simply, 
to speak good Saxon, a liar. If true, a hypocrite. For how could 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 483 

he pretend to be friendly with his pastor and at the same time 
write him a letter like that ? 

Of course in none of these cases did the recipient feel the least 
annoyance, or else the letters would not be shown as proof of the 
absurdity of anonymous letter-writing. 

The writer has seldom received an anonymous communication 
which was not complimentary ; yet he prays that no one may be 
tempted to write him an anonymous letter thanking him for the 
sound sense of this article ! 



PERPETUATED FELONY. 

JOHN HARTMAN'S STORY. 

My dear reader, if at any time you have thought of committing 
suicide I beg you to read the story of my friend, John Hartman, 
before you quite perform the irremediable act. To those who have 
never been even near desperation it may be interesting. This is 
John's story: 

We were talking about the burdens, the besetments, and the re- 
sponsibilities of life, when John said, " Do you recollect in what a 
bad state I was two years ago? " 

I did recolleet. 

" Well," said he, " my state of mind was such that I was on the 
point of committing suicide, and should have done so but for you." 

" Well," said I, " I did not know that you loved me enough to 
stay in a world of intolerable sorrow for my sake." 

" O, that isn't it," said John, " because you know that I love 
Maria and her boy and my father and mother a good deal more 
than I love you ; but it was something you wrote which led to a train 
of thoughts that stopped me from being a suicide. All life seemed 
dark to me. Every thing had gone wrong. My wife, Maria, was 
apparently a helpless invalid. My little boy was a cripple. I was 
a burden to my father and mother. My business had miscarried. 
I thought I had behaved honestly, but while being turned upon 
the world penniless a phase of one business transaction could 
scarcely be explained to my honor, and I was virtually driven from 



4$4 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

my club. My church did not exercise discipline upon me, but 
plainly I was shunned by the brethren. It seemed as if I beggared 
and disgraced every body that I touched. Any movement to im- 
prove my condition seemed to pull some heavier burden upon me. 
My health was failing, and somehow I worked myself up to the idea 
that the merciful God would pity a poor wretch who took himself 
out of so miserable a world. I had worked myself up to the point of 
having selected a razor which was to sever the jugular vein and cut 
me loose from the bonds of life. I had arranged every thing in a 
bath-room, to give as little trouble as possible with my remains. 
Somehow, at that very moment, I picked up a piece of a newspaper 
in which there was an article by you, and I concluded to glance 
over it as the last act of my life and a tribute of my friendship for 
you. It happened to treat on what a man owes his survivors. It 
showed that they were to be considered, and that a man's life should 
be such that when he died that life should not entail unnecessary 
troubles upon those who loved him. From that point I started on. 
It was a new idea to me. It never occurred to me that a dead man 
would owe, even after death, any thing to the living. I knew that 
the living owed duties to the dead ; but this was the other side of 
the question. When one has a friend dead he suffers a bereave- 
ment which that friend could not prevent, but when that friend 
has committed suicide there is an indefinable drop of gall and 
wormwood infused into the cup of bitterness, and that the sui- 
cide could have prevented as well as not. While a man lives, in 
whatever narrowness of environment, under whatever pressure of 
trouble, so long as he does his whole duty and struggles day by day 
to keep up, he is, at least, affording those about him an example of 
heroism which may go far toward redeeming him in their eyes 
from the effect of many a fault. He is at least a swimmer striving 
to keep himself up, not for his own sake, but for the sake of others. 
He has been caught by the freshet ; he has not jumped into the 
pool. 

u Then another thought came to me," he added ; " whatever 
mistakes a man makes, injurious or painful to those whom he loves, 
he may in the course of time repair the damage he has done, but 
the distress he has brought on others by his suicide is, by the very 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 485 

act itself, rendered irremediable. However sorry he may be in the 
land of the shades he can never repair the injury which he has 
done. That seemed to me dreadful, and suicide rose before me as 
a perpetuated felony toward those who could never find relief 
therefrom. Naturally that set the crime before me in the light of 
cowardice. There is nothing high, nothing brave in destroying 
one's own life. A murderer may be moved by passion ; it is pos- 
sible to kill a man under circumstances which make the act heroic, 
but a suicide is always mean, despicable, and cowardly. It is his 
fierce egotism that makes him forgetful of the sufferings of all others 
and eager only to obtain relief for himself. The very moment that 
view came clear before my eyes I abandoned all thought of suicide. 
I said to myself, ' I shall reach a point where my troubles will 
break my heart or brains and so give me release, or I shall mend 
my affairs, or, in the shifting of human affairs, they will mend them- 
selves ; but if I am to live to be a hundred years old, and in the 
depth of poverty and trouble all that while, I will stand it ; and I will 
employ the time in endeavoring to repair all the wrongs that I have 
done. I will not, by one irreparable act, leave to others a burden 
of trouble from which no power in heaven or earth can relieve them 
so long as they live.' So instead of severing my jugular vein that 
morning I shaved myself and went to work. My nearness to de- 
struction seemed to act as a tonic, and from that time forth the 
brave way in which I have walked into the clouds has dissipated 
them, and life is becoming not only more and more tolerable, but 
really more and more comfortable." 



ONE'S SURVIVORS. 

[The following is the article referred to in John Hartman's story.] 

The man who takes a proper view of his moral obligations feels 
that he owes something to those friends who may survive him. A 
partial admission of this is made by every man who insures his life. 
But the conviction need to be made more intensive as well as more 
extensive. 

It is a meanly selfish thing to care for nothing that may happen 

when we are dead. One says, " What do I care ; I shall know noth- 
31 



4 86 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

ing about it ! " Very true, but some one will ; some one to whom 
you are under obligation, perhaps some one who loved you, certainly 
some one who is somehow to be affected by your departure from 
human society. Some one has at least to be at the trouble of bury- 
ing any sort of a man who may die, even the most worthless. 

A proper sentiment on this subject would perhaps prevent every 
form of suicide. Men have been known to take their own lives with 
most scrupulous care that survivors should have as little trouble as 
possible in disposing of their remains and closing up their affairs, 
but the act itself has left a heritage of shame, or other distress, to 
all who bore them any relationship. It is more criminal to inflict 
pain on our survivors than on those with whom we live, because, 
whether done by design or negligence, it adds cowardice to the 
other elements of evil. In this case the wrong-doer increases the 
burden to be borne at the very moment that he withdraws his por- 
tion of the support. 

Our departure amid the most favorable circumstances, of comfort 
and ripened life and accomplished work and ample provision for 
surviving relatives, must give the unavoidable pain of bereavement. 
We are morally bound to live and die so that, as far as in us lies, no 
unnecessary pain be added to hearts that love us and are wounded. 
Care for our reputation, preservation of all our alliances in an un- 
tangled condition, thorough fulfillment of our obligations of relation- 
ship up to the last day of life, preparation of complete explanation 
of every thing which might raise a question in our affairs, these 
things we owe our survivors as certainly as we owe them truth and 
honorable dealing while we are with them. Beyond that we are 
bound to live so that our surviving Christian friends shall not have 
distressing doubt as to our spiritual salvation. 

Death vacates no moral obligations, but it may put it out of our 
power to repair the wrong we may inflict in dying. 



BLESSED ST. IGNORANCE. 
Good Thomas a Kempis, whose Imitation of Christ has given con- 
viction and strength and encouragement to many a soul, once wrote: 
" My son, in many things it is thy duty to be ignorant." 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 487 

We live in an age in which all classes of men unite in chorus of 
praise to knowledge. There have in the late centuries been such 
rapid acquisition of knowledge and such application of knowledge 
to the amassing of wealth that every body is ready to say a good 
word for knowledge. My Lord Bacon wrote, " Knowledge is power." 
The saying has not only been the theme of many a collegian's ora- 
tion, but also the secret of much close application to intellectual pur- 
suits. The desire for power is innate in man, because he is a child 
of God. It is said that " any fool can get rich ; " but a very slight 
inspection of society will show the ambitious young man that wealth 
is the door to power, and that knowledge is the key to that locked 
door. Wherefore he studies mineralogy, geology, and chemistry, that 
he may open the door, and go in to the power. Those who appre- 
ciate knowledge for its own sake are exceeding few. 

Now, it is not true that all knowledge is power ; it is true — what a 
wiser than Bacon said — " He that increaseth knowledge increaseth 
sorrow." It is a mistake to suppose that what the world needs is 
culture, and that learning will necessarily produce goodness ; that 
intelligence will insure morality and culture create holiness. But a 
craze seems to be upon our people for knowledge ; so much so that 
they are like a child who, in the study of a scientist, fills his little 
apron as full as he can hold it of prisms and microscopes and stere- 
oscopes and crucibles and retorts, and goes out thinking himself rich, 
while the little fellow has not the faintest idea of any use which any 
human being can make of any one of these instruments. That is 
the reason why in this day there are so many learned fools. 

Is there no one to say a kind w T ord for ignorance ? I really fear 
that I should not have the courage to do so but for the most excel- 
lent words of Thomas a Kempis. Emboldened by them, I stand 
amid the derision of the cultivated classes and fold my hands and 
devoutly say, " Blessed be Saint Ignorance ! " I would also use that 
prayer which is in The Imitation, " Da mihi, Domine, sci?'e quod 
sciendum est" in the sense of Matthew Arnold's translation, " Grant 
that the knowledge I get may be the knowledge worth having." 

It is not the duty of any man to know every thing, for the reason 
that no man can know every thing. Therefore he must make selec- 
tion of the things which he can know and which he believes he 



488 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

should know ; and in this work he is bound to employ his best judg- 
ment. On the other hand, there are things of which he should re- 
main in perfect ignorance, if possible ; that is to say, should keep 
himself from being in any position in which he is likely to learn 
them. 

1. It is better not to know useless things, because it is injurious to 
have the mind filled with the knowledge of mere facts of which no 
use can be made in the cultivation of the intellect, in the improve- 
ment of the morals, or in the enlargement of the life. There are peo- 
ple who would feel that they were greatly wronged if they could not 
know every latest thing that had occurred. Many such people can- 
not afford seven dollars a year for a daily paper, and yet they feel as 
if they must know every thing that has happened in all the world in 
the preceding twenty-four hours. They must know who fell down 
stairs ; who mashed his thumb ; whose ox fell into the ditch ; who 
broke into a distant bank ; what lewd woman has arrived from Eu- 
rope ; who ran away with whose wife and who found it out, and how 
he came to tell it, and where she is now, and what her husband is 
going to do about it, and how many wives the fellow had who took 
her off. The daily newspapers, it may be said very conservatively, 
are four fifths filled with things that nine tenths of the human beings 
in this country have no need of ever knowing in this world, and will 
probably never have any need of knowing in any world that is to 
come. Probably only one tenth of all the people in the city of New 
York who read this morning's papers learned two things worth their 
ever knowing. This statement may be supposed to exclude all spec- 
ulators in stocks, in oil, and in grain ; they do want the quotations. 

There would be no harm in all this acquisition of useless knowl- 
edge if it did not occupy the time and exhaust the strength which 
might be employed in gaining knowledge which would be really 
useful. 

2. Then, again, it is a most excellent thing to be ignorant of what- 
ever corrupts the imagination or in any shape weakens the moral 
principle. Now, very much in our literature — using that word to 
imply what is printed above the plane of ephemeral publications — 
falls into this category. In drama, in novels, in historical composi- 
tion, in philosophical treatises, nay, even in sermons, we sometimes 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 489 

find .that which is absolutely injurious. What do we mean by inju- 
rious? That is injurious to me which makes it more difficult for me 
to obey all the commandments of the heavenly Father; in other 
words, to be good. All knowledge is to be considered as an end to 
goodness ; and if there be any knowledge which does not make a 
man better that knowledge is either injurious or useless. 

3. It is a good thing to be ignorant of any thing which may suggest 
to me a captivating method of doing wrong. It is best not to have 
the acquaintance of the devil when he comes as an angel of light. 
For this reason so many of the publications of the day are such as 
no human being ought to read or to see. They suggest new crimes 
or new methods of committing old crimes. All sins against chastity, 
property, and life are increased in the number of their commissions 
by publications detailing the modes in which these crimes have been 
committed. Tell a child or a man of a new way to commit a sin, 
and it will burrow in his imagination and influence his life, and most 
probably, in a moment of weakness and temptation, cause his moral 
ruin. 

I have the confession of an eminent clergyman, made years ago, 
and, if he is to be believed, never communicated to another human 
being, to the effect that he once heard from a man of great learning 
the description of a certain form of vice of the existence of which 
in human society he never before had had the slightest intimation. 
At first it was a shocking revelation to him ; but it wrought on him 
until he became familiarized with the idea. He fell under environ- 
ment of temptation, and found himself able to resist ; the second 
time the temptation to commit sin in that particular form occurred 
to him his strength had left and he fell, and had years of bitter re- 
pentance, relieving his soul in confession and prayer. Now, I cannot 
believe that his learned friend who made the statement to him in- 
tended to corrupt his moral nature ; he never dreamed of such a 
thing. He never would have told it to a child or even to a young 
person. But how much better it would have been for that Christian 
man to have gone to his grave ignorant of the possibility of that 
form of sin ! 

It seems that men ought to be very careful of their line of culture ; 
and men ought to be very careful of their communications to their 



490 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

fellow-men. Saint Ignorance knows many a thing because so igno- 
rant of many another thing. The fear of the Lord is the beginning 
of wisdom ; and there is no enlargement which can fail to be inju- 
rious if it do not increase in a man his reverence for the things which 
are high, invisible, and enduring. One great American humorist, who 
also was a very great philosopher, has said : " It is better to be igno- 
rant than to know so many things that are not so." 
Wherefore again I say, ''Blessed be St. Ignorance." 



UNPRAISED HELPERS. 



There are many people in the world who are doing much good, and 
who are both unnoticed by the world and unconscious to themselves. 
They often stand in close relation to very active, conspicuous, and 
useful people, with whom their humble souls contrast themselves to 
their own increase of despondency. 

For instance, here is a woman, without any genius, who has a brill- 
iant husband, a man distinguished in the councils of the nation, or 
on the lecture-forum, or in the pulpit, or at the bar ; or a man perpet- 
ually increasing the area of known truth by his investigations, and 
enlarging the field of human intelligence by his publications. The 
good woman compares herself to this brilliant husband, and says, 
" Alas ! I am doing nothing. What a sensation his last book made ! 
It has gone far and wide ; in many a household it is read for comfort 
or instruction, but I have never written a line which can be of benefit 
to any human being, unless it may have been in some of my poor 
letters." And so she depreciates herself and grows sad. 

In a church a humble layman may look up at the pulpit and see 
his pastor as on a throne of power when he is using the word of 
God authoritatively and is evidently swaying multitudes into paths 
of righteousness. The layman says to himself, '* I can scarcely lead 
my family in prayer, so broken is my thought and so lame is my 
language. I very seldom have the courage to say a word in our 
prayer-meetings. I seem to have no talent in the world but the 
talent of money-making. I can work down in my counting-house, 
and turn over and over dollar on dollar and get richer and richer ; 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 49 1 

but what is that compared with being rich in the souls one has 
brought to God in Christ Jesus ?" And so he becomes discouraged. 

But let these good people look on the other side. 

First take the case of the wife. Why is her husband so success- 
ful a man? Simply because he has not a particle of domestic care. 
His wife has raised his children so that not one of them has ever 
given him a pang. They are ensamples to the whole flock. He can 
say to his people, " Follow my children as they follow Christ." 
Every thing is at peace at home. This could not have come to pass 
if the good wife had not assiduously employed her practical common 
sense in looking after the domestic matters. Now, let her remember 
that while she was cheapening groceries, patching little trousers, 
darning her husband's stockings, mending here, saving there, smooth- 
ing yonder, often when her OAvn heart was tired and her hands weary, 
she was in all these things clearing the field for the exercise of her 
husband's great ability. He could not have had half the pow r er he 
wields nor half the field he occupies but for that good wife's good 
management. Half the glory of the crown which the Lord will give 
at the close of this ministry will belong to that good woman. She 
has done her part as faithfully as the husband has done his, and the 
Lord is not unmindful, to forget her labor of love. 

In the other case let the layman recollect that, as times are now, 
in the present organization of society, churches cannot be main- 
tained without money. Land must be bought and materials pro- 
cured for the erection of ecclesiastical edifices ; repairs must be 
made ; constant attendance is required ; and there must be some 
one who can furnish the pecuniary supplies. The pastor wants some 
members of his congregation who have great financial ability, and 
whose engagements allow them to do something for the Church. He 
must never have financial cares ; he must never have to think how 
his own support is to come, how a church debt is to be paid, how 
money is to be raised for repairs. It is a vicious system which rolls 
any of this work upon the heart of the pastor. Every man that 
takes any portion off leaves the soul of his pastor more alert, his 
intellect more elastic, his heart more ardent for the special work of 
edifying the saints and of calling sinners to repentance. 

There is many a blessed pastor this day who has a good time 



492 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

preaching the Gospel, and who may not himself know to what plain 
man of plodding, practical intellect he owes arrangements which 
make the financial affairs of his church run so smoothly as to relieve 
him of all care. But when the crowns come to be distributed then 
the Lord will remember the layman that had uncircumcised lips, 
like Moses, and not forget his labor of love in that he labored for 
the saints. 

Let us not be betrayed into misjudgments or despondencies by 
the appearance of things ; our main audience is behind the scenes. 
Where there is one seeing us on earth there are multitudes looking 
at us out of eternity. Little fames on earth are small indeed, but 
the glory of eternity is enduring. 



MEEKNESS. 

Meekness is not weakness. A man may be weak and meek, but 
he is not meek because he is weak. 

Rather, meekness implies strength ; some strength of passion. No 
being without passion can be meek. Meekness, therefore, is not 
apathy, since it demands feeling. Meekness is not stoicism, is not 
self-control ; which comes from the culture of the mind, and is pro- 
duced by mingling with gentle society. 

No man is naturally meek. Some people are born servile. They 
are Uriah Heeps from their birth. Some are born humble, some 
soft, some weak, some lymphatic. No man was ever born meek. 
The natural characteristic which most resembles meekness, which a 
man may have from his birth, is despicable ; and when he acquires it 
by practice it is villainous. 

St. Paul teaches, in Galatians v, that " meekness is the fruit of 
the Spirit." It is a purely Christian virtue. The heathen neither 
had it nor taught it. Roman virtue was precisely the opposite of 
meekness. He was the most virtuous man who used his powers of 
body and mind to punish his enemy. 

The meek man is a man out of whom pride, unforgiveness and 
hatred have been taken by the Spirit of God. He knows his rights ; 
he maintains them quietly. He feels through all his soul an injury 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



493 



done him, but never seeks redress by vengeance. That which by 
nature is despicable in man is absolutely sublime when superinduced 
upon his character by the Holy Spirit. He abstains from injuring 
his enemy, not because he does not feel the injury done him- 
self, nor because he has not power or skill to take vengeance, 
nor because it is politic to suffer wrong for a season, but because it 
is pleasing to his heavenly Father that he should overcome evil with 
good. Our highest example of consummate meekness is in our 
Lord Christ. The greatest possible injury was done to him, such as 
no other man ever endured. He thrilled to the core of his soul on 
being spit upon. Then did Jesus, being more insulted than any other 
man could be, having far more might and power over his enemies 
than ever any other man did have, bear all his wrongs as quietly as 
if he had no ability to take vengeance. Cowards and weaklings can 
never be meek, but strong, positive, passionate natures come to their 
utmost grandeur when they endure temporary wrong to themselves 
for the sake of eternal right to the universe. 



THE USES OF AN ENEMY. 
Always keep an enemy on hand ; a brisk, hearty, active enemy. 
Remark the uses of an enemy : 

1. The having one is proof that you are somebody. Wishy-washy, 
empty, worthless people never have enemies. Men who never move 
never run against any thing ; and when a man is thoroughly dead 
and utterly buried nothing ever runs against him. To be run against 
is proof of existence and position ; to run against something is 
proof of motion. 

2. An enemy is, to say the least, not partial to you. He will not 
flatter. He will not exaggerate your virtues. It is very probable 
that he will slightly magnify your faults. The benefit of that is two- 
fold ; it permits you to know that you have faults, and are, therefore, 
not a monster, and it makes them of such size as to be visible and 
manageable. Of course, if you have a fault you desire to know it ; 
when you become aware that you have a fault you desire to correct 
it. Your enemy does for you this valuable work which your friend 
cannot perform. 



494 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



3. In addition, your enemy keeps you wide awake. He does not 
let you sleep at your post. There are two that always keep watch, 
namely, the lover and the hater. Your lover watches that you may 
sleep. He keeps off noises, excludes light, adjusts surroundings, 
that nothing may disturb you. Your hater watches that you may 
not sleep. He stirs you up when you are napping. He keeps your 
faculties on the alert. Even when he does nothing he will have put 
you in such a state of mind that you cannot tell what he will do 
next ; and this mental qui vive must be worth something. 

4. He is a detective among your friends. You need to know who 
are your friends and who are not, and who are your enemies. The 
last of these three will discriminate the other two. When your 
enemy goes to one who is neither friend nor enemy and assails you 
the indifferent one will have nothing to say, or else will chime in, 
not because he is your enemy, but because it is so much easier to 
assent than to oppose, and especially than to refute. But your 
friend will take up cudgels for you on the instant. He will deny 
every thing and insist on proof, and proving is very hard work. There 
is not a truthful man in the world that could afford to undertake to 
prove one tenth of all his assertions. Your friend will call your 
enemy to the proof, and if the indifferent person through careless- 
ness repeats the assertion of your enemy he is soon made to feel 
the inconvenience thereof by the zeal your friend manifests. Fol- 
low your enemy around, and you will find your friends, for he will 
have developed them so that they cannot be mistaken. 

The next best thing to having a hundred real friends is to have 
one open enemy. 



DISENGAGING THE CARRIAGE. 

The other day I heard a story which, it seems to me, can be 
turned to use in some directions. 

In England they still keep up the atrocious railway system of 
putting omnibuses side by side, instead of having cars through 
which conductors can pass, where the publicity saves one from 
many an annoyance. Horrible things have been done in these car- 
riges, and sometimes funny things — I know one so funny that I 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE, 495 

dare not publish it. Intermediate between the tragedy and the 
comedy, the short story now told has a neutral tint. 

An Englishman entered one of these compartments with his great 
mastiff dog. The dog assumed a posture of repose and his master 
adjusted himself comfortably in his seat and took out his book to 
read. Just before the train started a guard looked in at the win- 
dow and quietly remarked that the dog could not be allowed to sit 
in the carriage, but must be taken to the baggage-van. " Certainly," 
said the passenger, with very gentle tone, " take him by all means." 

Now, the guard was a very dutiful fellow, but probably had a 
wife and perhaps a child, and, it may be, several other objections 
to affording himself as a breakfast to the powerful brute in the car- 
riage ; so he shut the door and passed on, hoping that the passen- 
ger's reflection would bring him to reason and lead him to take his 
dog to its rightful place. At the next station the guard, in passing, 
stopped at this carriage and made the same remark to the gentle- 
man, that the dog must be carried to the baggage-van. 

" O, certainly," blandly said the passenger; " I have not the least 
objection ; take him." The guard, as aforetime, shut the door and 
passed on. 

The gentleman resumed his reading. The novel was fascinating, 
and he read a number of pages. At last it occurred to him that 
the stop at the station was unusually long. After a little while he 
hailed a guard upon the platform and said to him : 

" When does the train start ? " 

" O, sir," said the guard, " your train has gone." 

u Gone ! " said he. " Why, how is it that I am here ? " 

" You were told the rules of the company, sir. You did not 
choose to comply, so the order was given to disengage this carriage." 

The guard passed on. The gentleman sat in his seat in quiet 
with his dog, a much wiser man, and he had gained all this addi- 
tional wisdom without the shedding of one single drop of blood or 
the utterance of one single angry word. 

I have pondered this narrative no little. Having been many 
years engaged in striving to rectify society generally, and particu- 
larly in trying to get every man and every dog in his rightful place, 
I have more than once tackled the mastiff; and I am compelled in 



496 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

truthfulness to say that, to the best of my recollection, in every in- 
stance the mastiff had the better of it. On other occasions I have 
been weak enough to quarrel with the master, to berate him for not 
taking the trouble to observe the rules of the road and put his dog 
in the baggage-van. Now, I have observed that quarreling is not 
among my most shining natural or acquired talents ; I have seen 
several dozen, not to say a few hundred, of men who could out- 
quarrel me every day in the year, including Sunday. 

My philosophy and my manners have been put to shame by the 
cool and quiet railway-guard. His seems to be the very plan to 
put the misery where it belongs. Now, many times, no gratifica- 
tion could be given to a mastiff greater than for a man of moderate 
build to attempt to drag him from a railway-car. It is a gratuitous 
presentation to him of that for which he has been long pining, and 
which he probably has not for several weeks been able to find a fair 
reason to embrace. Moreover, there is many a master to whom it 
would be no small gratification to see you attempt to remove his big 
brute from the car. In that effort, therefore, no one is hurt but 
yourself. If you quarrel with the master you may excite him so 
that he will set his dog on you, and, being well acquainted with 
his dog, having modes of communication which could not be sub- 
stantiated in a court-house, he may do so with perfect immunity. 
Nay, more ; it is exceedingly difficult to put a fellow-man in hot 
water without becoming at least somewhat heated yourself, either 
in preparing said hot water or in plunging your opponent thereinto. 

Therefore, I leave it to every calm, intelligent reader, whether 
the best plan after all is not to disengage the car. One can sit for 
long minutes enjoying great delight in contemplating the emotions 
which possessed the soul of the guard in this story as he walked 
past the carriage after it had been disengaged, and heard the anxious 
inquiry of the occupant. There cannot be the least doubt that he 
went by on purpose to receive the question ; and the delight of his 
spirit when he could coolly tell the passenger, " O, your train is 
gone, sir," is something delicious to contemplate. You see, instead 
of putting the ugly passenger into hot water, or before even going 
to the trouble to follow the gospel plan of heaping coals of fire upon 
his head, you go through that peculiar process which makes a 



FOR E VER Y FIRESIDE. 497 

man boil internally by means of having an external freezing mixture 
applied to him. For all moral purposes it is invariably better to 
have any man reach wise conclusions from within rather than from 
without. The latter he resists, and, wherever he can, he will break 
through ; but the former seems a part of himself. 

I told the above story at our breakfast-table this morning, and 
my little granddaughter, after a pause in the merriment which suc- 
ceeded — a merriment in which she did not join — looked up at me 
and said very seriously: " Gramps, did the gentleman go on in the 
next train? " Here I switch off to say that I took that occasion to 
instruct the child on the proper method of listening to a narrative ; 
it spoils the effect decidedly to ask questions afterward. It is to be 
supposed that the artist has put in the picture all that he wants put 
in, and to ask him what is behind that chair or under that sofa is 
certainly not the correct thing in art. I had told my story so as to 
leave my audience with just two figures in their minds — the cool, 
triumphant guard on the platform, and the boiling, discomfited pas- 
senger in the carriage. 

Since leaving the breakfast-table, however, it is due to the child 
to say that I have taken up her suggestion, and have been following 
that passenger in my mind. Without positive knowledge of any 
subsequent facts a priori I can say this : that when he traveled, after 
that trip, he either left his dog at home or took him to the baggage- 
van before he secured his own seat. 

I propose to carry the moral of this story into my own life, and 
not hereafter either tackle the mastiff or provoke the master ; but 
just quietly to disengage the car. I give all people of my acquaint- 
ance due notice that if any thing shall hereafter come up in my re- 
lations with them in which there shall be presented to me the con- 
ditions of having to pull the mastiff from the carriage or spend a 
half-hour in an aggravating quarrel with his mastiff's master, or dis- 
engage the car, I shall in all cases invariably adopt the last of the 
three modes ; I shall go on with the train, however, and not stay 
back to see how the master and his dog are enjoying themselves in 
their undisturbed quiet. 



498 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

LETTING OFF STEAM. 

The work and worry of the world produce in us all, at times, a 
nervous condition which is very much like the generation of pent-up 
steam. The steam must have a vent, either upon machinery which 
it can operate or out into the open air. The steam must get out 
some way, or a little more heat will give it such elasticity as shall 
make it burst the boiler. 

It may be laid down as a rule, to which there can be the fewest 
possible exceptions, that it is better to waste the steam than burst 
the boiler. 

The world is so provoking, the people you help are so ungrateful, 
the demands upon you are so unreasonable, and sometimes so exas- 
perating, that you don't know what to do. You are a Christian man, 
and cannot rage around generally. Many is the time when it would 
be a most relieving thing for you to M curse Jacob and defy Israel ; " 
or curse any body and defy every body else. But one moment's loss 
of your self-control might hurl you from a position of influence which 
you would find it exceedingly difficult to regain. 

It does not do to be writing fiery letters and sending them to cor- 
respondents or contributing them to the press. They cannot be re- 
called. They remain against you. Two days after you have mailed 
your letter to your correspondent five hundred miles away, in which 
letter you shake your fist in his face and tell him "he is another," 
you are as cool as a cucumber, and sit in your room covered with 
the garments of humiliation. If you only had that letter back, how 
calm, how dignified, how self-respectful would be your reply! But 
alas ! it has gone out of your hands, never to return but to shame 
you. 

How is a man to obey that injunction of the apostle, " Be ye an- 
gry and sin not ? " We think we have discovered a method, from 
having considered the likeness which this rapid generation of heat in 
the human being bears to the generation of steam in the engine. 
The steam must drive something, or burst something, or get out 
somewhere in open space. This last is the thing to do when you 
have more than is necessary to drive your engine ; let off the surplus 
steam where it touches nothing and can hurt neither you nor any 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



499 



one else. How would it do for each man to have his little cursery, 
and when he gets mad go into that apartment so arranged that no 
human being can hear him ? The Lord would hear him, but then 
the Lord has more charity than men. You may trust yourself with 
a crime to God sooner than you can trust yourself with a peccadillo 
to your fellow-man. If you growl or rage, or even — O, dreadful 
thought ! — curse and swear, there will be no one to hear it but your 
heavenly Father and yourself. He knows your frame. He remem- 
bers that you are dust. You will soon become ashamed of yourself, 
and when in that little apartment you have heaped articulate male- 
dictions upon your enemy — maledictions which cannot hurt him — 
you will probably close your visit to your cursery by falling on your 
knees before God and offering such prayers for your enemy as will 
do you good, if not your enemy. 

If you cannot reach your cursery sit down with your paper and 
pen and ink and write a letter to your foe ; make it savage ; " pile 
up the agony; " ransack your memory for epithets that shall, so to 
speak, gouge and bite and tear the soul of your enemy. Find scor- 
pion words and tie them to the end of the lash of your invective, 
and flay him soundly in your letter. Then lock your letter in your 
desk and take a walk. You will have such comfort in chuckling over 
the idea of the way you have rasped him ! Keep the letter seven 
days. It will not spoil. Perhaps you can improve it. Each day go 
back and see if you cannot put in a harder word. Spend a portion 
of each day in looking through the dictionary for some stinging epi- 
thet which your memory previously may not have recalled. Do this 
seven days, including Sunday, and then you will have sense enough 
not to mail it, and you will feel perfectly relieved. 

Try this plan ; we know it to be good. 

A friend of ours, a noted clergyman, once thought himself to be 
misrepresented by a newspaper. He wrote a letter to the editor, 
and, being on a visit to New York, he brought it to our study to get 
our opinion. We saw that what he had written had been a relief to 
him ; but we suggested that he should make it severer, and we said 
to him : 

" Doctor, put this sentence in ; " and we dictated something which 
was immensely savage. Lower down in the letter we told him to 



5oo 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



" insert the following ; " and then we gave him a dictation as broad 
and hot as we could make it, so as to resemble a stream of lava. He 
was delighted at first to see the spirit with which we entered into 
the matter. When the whole thing was done, and we seemed to be 
satisfied, he became quite dissatisfied. He thought it was too tart. 
Indeed, he began to think it was too savage, and finally concluded 
that the letter would be a very unchristian thing for him to send. 

" Send ! " said we. " You are not going to send him any thing; 
are you ? You would not notice such an attack as that ! " 

" Not send it ! " said he ; "well, why in the world have we spent 
an hour preparing it?" 

" O," said we, "only to relieve ourselves. We don't care any thing 
for the editor, but we must let off steam." 

The laughter that filled our study was the best part of the enjoy- 
ment. The letter was posted to the person to whom it was ad- 
dressed and mailed in our stove, and the writer thereof and the 
editor aforesaid have since become very good friends. The steam had 
been let off. The boiler of our brother was saved, and no machinery 
that could work mischief was set in operation. 

Brethren, it is well enough to continue constant in prayer, but, you 
may depend upon it, it is very healthy to let off steam occasionally. 



"THE WOMAN IN WHITE." 

In looking over some papers lately we came across a correspond- 
ence which had escaped us. " The Woman in White" has long seemed 
to us a story which, quite as much as any other in our knowledge, 
exhibited extraordinary art in the management of the details, as well 
as in the cast of the main materials. Nearly twenty-five years ago 
this impressed us so much as to lead to the correspondence which 
we had forgotten, and now reproduce. It tells its own story: 

To Wilkie Collins. 

Raleigh, N. C, Aug. 10, 1865. 

Dear Sir : In a recent conversation in my family circle the question was started 

as to how much of a story was usually in an author's mind when he sat down to 

write his first page. Among others your " Woman in White " was instanced as a 

very remarkable case of a long story, compact with incidents and scenes, with rela- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 501 

tive position and perilous combinations, a very large number of which are novel and 
exciting, perhaps scarcely any violative of probability, and all interwoven with a 
strange power, which keeps the interest of the reader alive and active from the first 
paragraph to the very last. 

Now, such questions as these arose : Were the young artist and his lady love, 
her husband and cousin, the "Woman in White" and her mother, Count Fosco 
and his wife, well-defined characters in Mr. Collins's mind before he began to 
write? Was the denouement determined in advance of all? Was Sir Percival's 
fate known to the author before he was introduced into the story? Was or was 
pot the first chapter written after the last ? If before, did the author know how he 
was going to use the flighty little Italian in connection with Count Fosco's fate? 
In any case did the author go back to insert some incident, speech or character- 
istic, to bear upon which he had written in a later part of the story? 

All these, and divers other questions bearing upon the rationale of the story, 
were discussed. Now, it so happened that none of our party had ever written a 
novel, or even a story, of any great length, and had never conversed with any au- 
thor on this subject. 

As your "Woman in White" has been specially discussed, I concluded to ad- 
venture a letter to you on this subject. If it amuse you and interest you enough a 
very great favor would be bestowed by such a history of the conception and execu- 
tion of that work, or any other, as you think would be acceptable to inquirers in 
psychology. 

Whether it suit your convenience and feelings to make a reply or not you will be 
pleased to consider this letter as sincerely complimentary to your powers, which I 
need not assure you are so highly appreciated on this side of the Atlantic. 

Very respectfully, your obedient servant, 

Charles F. Deems. 
Wilkie Collins, Esq. 

From Wilkie Collins. 
Elm Lodge, Mount Ephraim, Tunbridge Wells, Oct. 5, 1865. 

Dear Sir : I have had no earlier opportunity than this of replying to your letter. 

I think I can give what is called a practical answer to the questions prompted by 
your kind interest in my book. Neither the " Woman in White," nor any other of 
my serial stories, were completed in manuscript before their periodical publication. 
I was consequently obliged to know every step of my way, from beginning to end, 
before I started on my journey. 

To make this plain by an instance : When I sat down to write the seventh weekly 
part of " The Woman in White " the first weekly part was being published simul- 
taneously in All the Year Round and in Harper s Weekly. No after-thoughts, in 
connection with the first part, were possible under these circumstances, and the 
same rule applied, of course, week after week, to the rest of the story. I had no 
choice but to know what to do beforehand throughout the whole story; and months 
before a line of it was written for the press I was accumulating that knowledge in 
a mass of " notes " which contained a complete outline of the story and its charac- 
ters. I knew what Sir Percival Clyde was going to do with the marriage register, 
and how Count Fosco's night at the opera was to be spoilt by the appearance of 
Professor Pescer, before a line of the book was in the printer's hands. 

The minor details of incident, and the minor touches of character, I leave to sug- 
32 



502 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



gest themselves to me at the time of writing for the publication. But the great 
stages of the story, and the main features of the characters, invariably lie before 
me on my desk before I begin my book. In the story I am now writing (" Arma- 
dale ") the last number is to be published several months hence, and the whole close 
of the story is still unwritten. But I know at this moment who is to live and who 
is to die, and I see the main events which lead to the end as plainly as I see this 
pen now in my hand — as plainly as I see the ground laid, months since, in the pub- 
lished part of the story, for what (if I am spared to finish it) you will read months 
hence. How I shall lead you from one main event to the other ; whether I shall 
dwell at length on certain details or pass them over rapidly ; how 1 may yet develop 
my characters and make them clearer to you by new touches and traits ; all this, I 
know no more than you do, till I take the pen in hand. But the characters them- 
selves were all marshaled in their places before a line of "Armadale" was written. 
And I knew the end ten years ago in Rome, when I was recovering from a long 
illness and was putting the story together. 

Such is the best explanation I can offer of all that is explainable in the mental 
process which produces my stories. I beg you will accept it as an acknowledgment 
on my part of the interest you feel in my books, and as some small repayment 
(made through you) of the debt of obligation which I owe to my American readers. 

Believe me, dear sir, faithfully yours, 

Wilkie Collins. 

To the Rev. Dr. Deems, etc. 

Mr. Collins departed this life on the 23d of September, 1889, after 
a long literary career of great industry. 




IN THE BOUDOIR 






THE. 









>-^-n=^F=^"^-^" 




THE » BOUDOIR, 



5 ^p*^j 




A STORY OF A CHURCH BONNET. 

It was John the Baptist's Day in the city of St. Louis. I had 
been doing several days' work in Kansas and was on my way back 
to my New York parish. In eight years I had had but one Sunday 
of vacation, in view of which I concluded to make this particular 
Sunday my Sabbath for the week. So I betook me to St. George's 
Church for worship, and entered the house of prayer with most de- 
vout intent. 

Several things had been told me which my constant devotion to 
the pulpit had kept me from verifying. One of these was that it 
would do a pastor good to put himself in the place of the pew- 
holder and study the whole subject from the stand-point of the 
hearer and the worshiper. Men have told me that. Women also 
had told me that female dress had been a great obstruction to their 
piety, in attracting their attention from worship in the church, and 
had sent them home with uncomfortable feelings. I had been able 
to see the reason in what the men said more than in what the 
women said — largely, perhaps, because I am not a woman, But I am 
human. And this was my day. The morning prayer was Very 
helpful and got through without any serious difficulty, perhaps be- 
cause the reading-desk was on my left and my eyes were directed 
that way when lifted from my prayer-book. It is now recollected 
that there was something pretty or otherwise pleasant more nearly 
in front of me. What it was came into full play when I adjusted 
myself in the corner of my pew to listen to the sermon about to be 



506 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

delivered by my friend, the rector. Precisely in a line between him 
and me was a bonnet — perhaps the ladies would call it a " hat." 
I am not learned in this branch of knowledge, being, in fact, the 
standing amusement of the ladies of my domestic circle for my ab- 
surd and ridiculous ignorance of feminine gear. Hat or bonnet, it 
was a beauty. Would that I had sufficient mastery of the technique 
of millinery to make my readers take in all the details which were 
combined in the creation of this piece of capital ornament. Instead 
of such analytic description I must content myself with the unsat- 
isfactory, synthetic exclamation, " O, but it was a beauty ! " In 
general I may venture to say that the groundwork was black and 
soft and lacy. On that reposed, to that clung, or from that swung, 
a bunch of leaves and flowers, the differences and the contrasts 
and the harmonies of the colors and forms and combinations of 
which produced a most agreeable impression. My eyes ran just 
over the top of that bonnet to reach the preacher's face, and if they 
fell just one degree lower than that intellectual face they fell on that 
beautiful bonnet and — why should I not be honest ? — gladly rested 
there. 

How many trains of thought ran through my head ! I began to 
call up the different kinds of bonnets I had seen and the faces I had 
seen below them. While I could not recollect a single case of a 
lovely face below a bad bonnet I recalled some great disappoint- 
ments ; a notable one in Paris, in the days of my younger manhood, 
in the days of Empress Eugenie's loveliness and bonnets, when I 
made quite a little run to get in front of a carriage in which I had 
seen such a " love of a bonnet " only to be punished by beholding a 
dark, ugly, disagreeable, sinister female face. O, much of that un- 
edifying kind of thought ran through my head. While I was trying 
to hold tight to the thread of my friend's discourse on the rough, 
the lonely, the uncompromising, the un-Jerusalem preacher at the 
Jordan, my eyes would drop to rest on that beautiful bank of flow- 
ers. Then I found myself wondering whether this specially attract- 
ive combination of beauties had been made by the stately head that 
wore it, or whether it was the result of the laborious ingenuity of a 
New York modiste whom I know, or whether it had been imported 
from Paris or Vienna. It was in the midst of these conjectures that 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 507 

I was recalled to a sense of my condition by the emphatic declara- 
tion of the preacher that John the Baptist stood in the loneliness 
of high integrity, unaffected by the opinions of men or those senti- 
ments of society which demand that when we are at Rome we shall 
do as the Romans do, and, in the language of the rector, "If we 
should have occasion to pass through hell we should do as the 
devils do, at least while making the transit." This naturally lifted 
me from speculations suggested by the sight of the beautiful bonnet. 

Some people have a way of closing their sermons with what they 
call an " improvement." I have a desire to " improve " this bonnet 
incident. Upon going out of church I found in myself neither ad- 
miration nor dislike of the lady who wore the bonnet. Indeed, I 
did not see enough of her face to form any opinion of her. But 
there was a set of stubborn facts. I am not a woman ; I am only a 
man. I am not young ; indeed, I have no child that is not probably 
older than the lady with the beautiful bonnet. My studies have 
not been largely in the department of aesthetics ; they have been 
in science, physical and metaphysical. And yet a Christian minister, 
who is suspected of being on the edge of old age, who had reached 
the city very weary from the delivery of a course of lectures to a 
body of clergymen on " The Ministerial Life," who was longing for 
the quiet of the sanctuary, who had heard but two sermons in 
twelve months and was hungry for the word, and who had come 
from his hotel to hear this particular clergyman preach because he 
had had long regard for him and interest in him — such a hearer has 
his worship broken by a thing not bad, not ugly, not disagreeable. 

" Shame on the old minister ! He should have behaved better ! " 
Is that your comment ? You are right, and what you say is true; 
and he will try to do better next time. But here is something 
which actually has occurred, and it cannot be ignored. Shall we 
not learn lessons from our misfortunes and privations? Shall I 
have put myself "in the place of the pew-holder " and " heard from 
the stand-point of the worshiper," and no good come of it? Nay, 
verily. 

Suppose I had been a woman and had had my bonnet on. 
Could I possibly have refrained from wondering whether my bonnet 
was as beautiful as that other bonnet ? I do not see how I could 



5oS CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

possibly imagine it was more beautiful. Suppose it had been as 
beautiful. Then I was only on a par with another lady. But O ! 
and alas! there would have been a great probability that mine was 
not as handsome as hers ! Perhaps the people in the rear, some 
clergyman from New York, for instance, might have been making 
disparaging contrasts. How could I endure that ? You see, in the 
present state of fashion it is the worshiper in the rear who has to 
meet the whole thing ; those in front see nothing of it. The woman 
in the last pew cannot harm the congregation. The preacher 
sees no hats nor bonnets, except such as are built on the architectu- 
ral design of the Tower of Babel, or laid out and planted like the 
Hanging Gardens of Babylon. 

I left St. George's Church, St. Louis, as I might have left my 
own church in New York if I had been worshiping therein, or trying 
to worship therein, under similar conditions, if not a "wiser," I fear 
a "sadder" man. How often may it have occurred that when I 
had made all practicable preparations to preach the Gospel of the 
blessed God some attractively beautiful thing, unseen by the preacher, 
had stood between the man who had come to hear and me who 
had come to preach, and had broken the current and neutralized 
the effect of the discourse ! Can such things be prevented? 

Men do not wear any clothing calculated to attract attention ; it 
is the women. If reform come it must come from women. Will 
it? Where are those " Daughters of the King" of whom we hear? 
Can they do nothing? Will they not try? I talked it over with 
some ladies of the St. George's congregation. Any suggestion from 
a man might probably peril the reform. Cannot Christian women 
seek and obtain from God such a consecration of their aesthetic 
talents and culture as will enable them to devise some cure of an 
evil which is so great as to retard the preaching of the word of God ? 
Plainly, it must be the adoption of such a dress as will not call atten- 
tion to the individual wearer and will not be grotesque or offensive 
to, the beholders. All that is required is that it be tasteful and uni- 
form. I will not venture a suggestion, but I will describe a vision. 

I was in a sacred building. There was nothing to arrest or fix 
the attention. There were no figures in the stained glass, no in- 
scription on wall or ceiling, in aisle or nave, or chancel, or apse ; no 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 509 

triangle, nor crozier, nor cup, nor paten, nor dove, nor lamb, nor 
monogram. The light was neither gloomy nor glaring, but sooth- 
ing. The air was perfectly pure, without being either too cold or 
too warm. 

The house was full of men, women, and children. The men 
all wore capes which covered their shoulders completely, so that 
that was all their dress visible to the naked eye. Of the same soft 
stuff, the color of which was a warm neutral tint, were the veils 
worn by all the women. These veils fell only to the waist, so that 
they did not incommode the wearer in moving about while in a sit- 
ting posture. They were all alike in cut and color and quality, and 
all pinned on their heads with the same kinds of pins, and fell in 
the same folds of drapery. Looking from the rear of the edifice 
one could not tell which of the women were rich, which poor, which 
pretty, which homely, which old, which young. The clergyman 
wore a plain cassock. The altar was the pulpit, behind which he 
stood while reading the Holy Scriptures, beside which he kneeled 
while leading the service of prayer, and in front of which he stood 
while preaching the everlasting Gospel. And he did not part his 
hair in the middle or have any thing else, even in the way of glasses, 
which you would remember when you went away. A portion of 
the service was silent prayer, and the stillness of these moments 
sank through your soul like a precipitate and dropped all its cares. 
In almost all the prayer the whole congregation joined, and the 
close of those offered by the pastor were accentuated by a full, rich, 
warm, hearty, prolonged "Amen." After silent prayer no one spoke 
for the space of minutes, and then the pastor arose and went down 
the aisle to the door, and the women threw their veils over their 
faces and the men folded their hands over their breasts, and all 
bowed as they passed their minister, who, with lifted hands and 
eyes, said : " The Lord, w T ho hath blessed your coming in, bless 
also your going out. The Lord forgive the sins of your holy things, 
and grant unto you the joys of his salvation. The Lord go with 
you, and bless you, and cause the light of his countenance to shine 
upon you, that his way may be known upon earth and his saving 
health among all nations." 

And next day and next night, in social circles and at appointed 



5io 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



festivities, the variety and the beauty of the dresses of those women 
were really marvelous. 

You ask me where that church was ? Well, it was neither in St. 
Louis nor New York. 



ELEGANT SIMPLICITY. 



It is a dangerous thing for a party of the male sex to discourse 
on the subject of female attire. 

Every man of even the least cultivation delights in seeing women 
well dressed. The difficulty lies in settling the question of what it. is 
to be " well dressed," and that difficulty arises from the masculine 
ignorance of the details. As women pass before a man's eyes he 
knows at once whether the impression made upon him is pleasing 
or otherwise. But he cannot tell why. He doesn't know how much 
of an artist that woman had to become in order to be able to array 
herself in different garments that should have perfect adjustment to 
the person and perfect harmony of coloring. She has had to study, 
first, other women ; secondly, herself; thirdly, the masculine intel- 
ligence, in order to reach the consummation she has attained. 

Sometimes it costs pecuniarily to make such an achievement. The 
cost will vary according to the female artist's skill in using her ma- 
terials. The men who have to pay the bills, the husbands and papas, 
know something about this, and in the course of years secure a 
valuable education in this department of art and economy ; and, 
ordinarily, this class of gentlemen, if thoughtful and discreet, deliver 
tolerably rational criticisms on the subject. The men outside, the 
bachelors generally, are those who make mistakes in uttering 
their dicta on dress. As an example of this a young man says to 
his sister: 

" Why can't you imitate the economy and the elegant simplicity 
of the Van Bocker girls? They don't dress in silks, as you do ! For 
curiosity I inquired of a lady what a certain morning dress which I 
saw on one of the Van Bocker girls at Saratoga ought to cost. I 
learned that it was thirty-five cents a yard ; and they did look so 
sweet and fresh ! " 

" Quite true," said his sister ; " but you must recollect that few 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 511 

ladies indulge in that kind of toilet ; they must have several changes, 
and each dress must have a large quantity of furbelowing and fixing 
to make it look well ; and the laundrying of dresses of that kind 
costs more than the mere washing of pocket-handkerchiefs. So that 
if economy is what you have in view, dear brother, a good dress 
that cost more at the beginning may last longer and in the end cost 
ess. 

The fact is, we may as well understand that elegant simplicity in 
dress, as in manners, requires an outlay which demands a good in- 
come. Showiness is cheap. Elegance must be paid for by both 
money and taste ; but still more costly is elegant simplicity, which 
for the indulgence demands more and more taste. To a looker on 
nothing seems so easy as to make graceful motion. As he beholds 
a gymnast or danseuse it seems to him as though it only required 
him to will to do the same thing in order to have it accomplished. 
But let him step out into the middle of the floor and try it. A few 
movements of his limbs will convince him that it will require months 
of practice, under tuition, to move with the simple grace of the person 
whom he supposed it would be so easy to imitate. 

In literature we take our models of simple elegance, the writings 
in which the paragraphs run after one another as the ripples of a 
brook. It seems as though we could certainly write in that way if 
we could not employ a more ambitious style. And what a mistake 
we find this to be ! Our attempts soon show us that it is much more 
easy to turn off our periods full of sequipedalian words and inflated 
bombast, and that a little imagination, Webster's Dictionary, and 
Roget's Thesaurus will enable us to write in a style which seems abso- 
lutely sublime to the uneducated masses. But if we were to write 
like an Emerson we must write over and oft, and take pains to cor- 
rect, expurgate, and polish, so that each word shall seem to be the 
very best possible in its place. 

Our readers can carry this thought into their meditations upon 
the formation of character. An elegantly simple character is one of 
the most charming things in the world. But what thought, what 
care, what constant discipline, what incessant practice of every virtue 
through what a number of years, are required to give a man the 
character of elegant simplicity ! Let our young readers ask them- 



512 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



selves whether it is not worth while to endeavor to attain such a 
character as will remain for the admiration of the ages, like the 
Apollo Belvidere in statuary and the Great Pyramid ; which shall be 
the admiration of mankind when ten thousand ephemeral prettinesses, 
produced by sculptors and architects shall have passed away. 



CENSORIOUSNESS. 



The dogma of infallibility is not a mere ecclesiastical develop- 
ment. The seed of it is in every human heart. No man will claim 
it in so many words; but who does not feel it? Or, if we were all 
unconscious of its existence, who does not act upon it ? So few of 
us have any horror of the responsibility of sitting as judges that we 
are ready to go on the bench at any time and try any cause, 
however important and complicated, and however slender the 
evidence on either side. We pronounce judgment as if there 
could be no appeal, and act upon such sentences as final. Nay, 
more. There is a disposition on the part of many to go be- 
yond and keep surveillance of society, making themselves general 
detectives. They are often heresy-hunters. They are often self- 
constituted health-boards, enforcing social sanitary regulations of 
their ow r n. The plain fact is that they are censorious. They hold 
every man guilty until he proves his innocence. Every act is con- 
sidered to have sprung from a wrong motive until the contrary shall 
be made to appear. 

The reason why they do not " abstain from " this "evil" is because 
it has the " appearance " of good. It seems to evince a high moral 
sense. It looks like loyalty to truth. It looks unselfish. The man 
is not seeking to be popular ! He dares oppose a popular vice and 
a popular sinner ! He dares beard the lion in his den ! He is a 
martyr to his sense of right ! It is good and grand ! He applauds 
himself. He feels that others ought to applaud him. He under- 
takes to execute his own sentences. If he cannot hang the con- 
demned he treats him as an outlaw. If he cannot literally trans- 
port him, so far as he is able he socially sends him to " Coventry." 
The condemned is treated like a lost man. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 513 

All this is done that the purity of the judge shall be evinced. 
Men and women seem to think that kindness to a sinner is indorse- 
ment and participation of his sin. Hence the evil of social ostra- 
cism. A man that has fallen has so few helps to rise, and a woman 
who has fallen — God help her ! — has no aids but those which God 
gives. " Abstain from this evil " of censoriousness of temper, what- 
ever "appearance " of devotion to the right it may have. Be careful 
of your " virtuous indignation." I never find the least difficulty in 
getting up the requisite amount of virtuous indignation on any be- 
fitting occasion ; but I do find it very difficult to keep my indigna- 
tion virtuous. While burning the sin I ought to hate it will soon 
begin to flame up and burn the sinner, whom I ought to love. 



CHURCH COURTESIES. 



A well-known clergyman, in writing on other subjects, says : 
" But I did not sit down to write these preliminaries. I sat down 
to tell you how much good it did me, as I came down from the pul- 
pit during my vacation, to have a lady member of the ' Church of 
the Strangers ' ask me if she had not heard Dr. Deems speak of me, 
and then kindly give me God-speed on your account. It was a sweet 
and cheering surprise. And I have thought that it was due you, as 
well as the lady in question, that I should communicate the fact to 
you. Perhaps it is the habit of all your members. I would that it 
might prevail in all our churches." 

We thank our lady parishioner for her politeness to our gifted 
brother. We frequently have such kindness extended to us. It is 
very pleasing to have a stranger come up to the pulpit-steps and claim 
acquaintance because the far-off pastor of the stranger had said some- 
thing good of the preacher to whom the stranger had just listened. 
In this world of manifold naughtiness it is a mission of grace to go 
about telling every man you know all the good you have heard 
spoken of him, and by whom. It would lift many a man from his 
despondency. It would help to sweeten society generally. Do not 
be afraid of spoiling the person to whom you speak. More people 
are "spoiled " by want of praise than by any superabundant admin- 
istration thereof. It is thunder, and not music, which turns milk sour. 



5 i 4 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

HOW TO CURE GOSSIP. 

Adopt this rule : Let all who come to you with stories about 
mutual acquaintances know that you intend, as soon as your duties 
allow, to wait upon the parties spoken of disparagingly and repeat 
just what was said and who said it. Still better, take out your 
memorandum-book and ask the party to allow you to copy the 
words so that you can make no mistake. 

You will have to do this probably not more than three times. 
It will fly among your acquaintances on the wings of the gos- 
sips, and persons who come to talk against other persons in 
your presence will begin to feel as if they were testifying under 
oath. 

But, you ask, " Will it not be mean to go off and detail conver- 
sations?" Not at all, when your interlocutor understands that he 
must not talk against an absent person in your presence without ex- 
pecting you to convey the words to the absent person, and the name 
of the speaker. Moreover, what right has any man or woman to 
approach you and bind you to secrecy and then poison your mind 
against another ? If there be any difference in your obligations — are 
you not bound more to the man who is absent than the man who is 
present? If you can thus help to kill gossip it will not matter if 
you lose a friend or two ; such friends as these, who talk against 
others to you, are the very persons to talk against you to 
them. 

Try our rule. We know it to be good. We use it. It is known 
in the church of which we are pastor that if any one speaks to us 
disparagingly of an absent member we hold it our duty to go to that 
absent member immediately and report the conversation and the 
names, or, still better, to make the party disparaging face the party 
disparaged. We have almost none of this to do. Amid the many 
annoyances which necessarily come to the pastor of a large church, 
and still larger congregation, we think that we are as free from the 
annoyance of gossips as it is possible for a man to be who lives 
among his fellow-men. 

Try our rule; try it faithfully, with meekness and charity, and if it 
does not work well let us know. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 515 

"RUSIAN GOSSIP." 

We believe that that is the name given to a parlor game which is 
as instructive as it is entertaining. Whether that be its name or 
no, the following is a description of the game : A statement is 
written, and read by one person to a second person alone. The first 
person retires and a third person is sent in, who receives it from the 
second person, and so on until six or seven persons have heard the 
narrative. The seventh person then rises in the company and states 
what was told him. The first person then reads the paper from 
which he read the statement, and the contrast between that and the 
report of what has passed through the hands of seven persons is 
always striking and often amusing. It illustrates the untrustworth- 
iness of reports that go through many heads and many mouths. It 
is not that " all men are liars." It is that we have limited capabil- 
ities, and that we are not accustomed to listen intently and to re- 
port accurately what we hear from day to day. We ask our read- 
ers to try this game and study the results. 

An illustration came under our own observation last winter. A 
number of ladies and gentlemen were assembled in our own parlors. 
We began to discuss the difficulties of reporting and the folly of 
relying upon reports. This led to the discrepancies which occur 
between witnesses of good character and acknowledged ability in 
regard to the simplest affairs which have come under their own obser- 
vation. To some of the company the views advanced seemed to be 
exaggerated. It was supposed to be so easy to hear any thing and 
then tell it. 

In order to test this matter and to give a lesson on the subject 
the writer proposed to take a gentleman into the back parlor and 
read to him a single sentence from a daily paper and let him report, 
as far as he could recollect, to another person who should be sent 
into the room until seven persons should have heard it and reported 
it. It was agreed that no other word should be said beyond what 
was necessary to the attempt upon the part of the speaker to repro- 
duce the impression made upon him by the former speaker. Now 
in that line of reporters was one distinguished lawyer, and one Chris- 
tian lady noted for the extreme carefulness and accuracy of her state- 



516 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

ments; and there were several other persons of different ages and 
both sexes. The first experiment was made in a little narrative 
which we extemporized for the occasion. The report of the last per* 
son was a most ridiculous contrast to what we read. We then pro- 
posed to test it in the simplest possible way. We took out the 
judge and read to him the following single sentence from the news- 
paper of that day. It passed through six other minds. The last 
person made a report. We had all promised to make our utmost 
effort to be accurate, as if we were upon oath. Here is the result. 
The sentence read was the following: 

* Warden Fox, of the penitentiary on Blackwell's Island, this 
morning notified the coroners' office that Christie Snyder, the con- 
vict who was beaten by a fellow-prisoner a few weeks ago, had died 
this morning from his injuries in the prison hospital." 

The report made was the following : 

" Warden Cox, of Ward's Island, notified the Board of Health 
that one of the patients died this morning; name unknown." 

Our readers can see how little there was to recollect. None of 
us had left the house. Not half an hour had elapsed from the first 
reading to the last report. We had all put our minds to it, and we 
were certainly not self-conceited in supposing that we represented 
at least a company of average intelligence. There was no tempta- 
tion to misrepresent. And yet, there is the result ! 

Now, dear friend, whenever you charge your fellow-man with 
lying, stop and think whether the test which you applied to him if 
applied to you would not ruin your reputation for veracity. And 
yet all history is made up of just such reports as these. We never 
knew a man who was present at a battle or any other striking and 
stirring event who ever saw what he considered a true account 
thereof, nor could he produce an account which any other actor or 
spectator would pronounce to be accurate. We are almost prepared 
to state that we believe that no absolutely accurate history can be 
written by any one but the omniscient God. Such a belief gives no 
occasion to despair. The business of our lives is to train our 
powers and approximate, as well as our limited abilities will allow, 
to the capability of being accurate. We must endeavor to repro- 
duce the ideal, although we may never be able to realize it perfectly. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 517 

In the preparation of history the philosphic intellect must collate 
the reports, and from what has been seen by many eyes he must 
form, according to the known laws of thought, a theory Of what 
actually did take place. In doing so he will be affected by his lim- 
itations and prepossessions. All these exist to such an extent that 
there are very many thoughtful people, whose opinions are worth 
something, who regard the Waverley Novels as just as good authority 
as Macaulay's History of England, or Lingard's, or Smollett's, or 
Hume's. Let us cultivate a love of the true and of the good, and 
endeavor to attain as much of these as possible by the aid of the 
Holy Spirit. 



PRESENTS. 

From time immemorial it has been customary to make presents. 
Gifts are supposed to be and intended to be tokens of kindness and 
respect. The peculiarity of a present is that it is a gift without the 
element of alms. A monarch may receive a present, but he cannot 
take any thing as a charity. A child may make a present to its 
parents, but cannot offer alms to them. In its highest signification 
the reception of a present implies a favor to the giver and not to the 
receiver. It is the latter that confers the favor. The former desires 
to have the pleasure of making some expression of regard. The re- 
ceiver gives that pleasure. It is never intimated that the receiver 
needs the present ; and so, w r hen the highest signification attaches 
to the gift, it must be something which costs the giver something to 
give, but does not at all serve the receiver, except as a sign of the 
devotion of the giver. 

When the wise men of the East made their presents to the infant 
Redeemer they brought gold and frankincense and myrrh ; they did 
not bring milk and clothes. They gave the divine Babe most costly 
things, which they had brought from a great distance, and of which 
the child could make no use whatever. That is giving in its highest 
poetical sense. 

Whenever a person of delicate perceptions desires to give alms 

he should strive as much as possible to put into the giving that high 

poetical idea, so as to take from the receiver, as far as possible, any 
33 



5 i8 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

sense of humiliation he may have in receiving the gift. The strik- 
ing incident in the early history of the Bethlehem Babe has given 
rise to the beautiful custom of Christmas presents. These annual 
gifts do double service. They serve the cause of religion and of 
friendship. They put warmth into the icy heart of winter. They 
make associations that last through the years. They do good in 
many ways. 

In this Western world and in these modern times we descend 
from the high Oriental idea of gifts to the more practical methods 
of making presents ; nor do we think that any thing is lost by con- 
necting the idea of use with that of beauty. 

It requires great skill to make a present. It is easier to give fifty 
dollars clear out in money than to know how to spend five dollars 
for a present that shall delight and benefit the receiver and be 
creditable to the giver. He who receives must put the gift in some 
position in which it shall do honor to the giver. His natural sense 
of gratitude prompts this. Whatever is sent must be received. 
There is an old adage to the effect that " one must not look a gift 
horse in the mouth." It forcibly expresses the duty of the receiver 
to an observance of delicacy in the reception, and yet it is very hard 
to be supposed to have received an elegant steed from a friend 
when one has got only a spavined and broken-down hack. 

He who meditates the kindness of a gift ought somehow to as- 
certain whether the particular article will be acceptable. To send 
a splendid Maltese cat to a lady who is almost driven into epilepsy 
by the sight of even a picture of a feline creature creates a great 
hardship, especially if you inform the lady that you sent all the way 
over the sea and spent as much in the purchase of the animal as 
would support a poor family through a winter. To give a horse to 
a poor parson with a large family of children, whom he can scarcely 
support, would be burdening the man, because he would finally 
have to sell his horse, or something else, to pay his livery bills. 

Those who are going to make presents should ascertain, if possi- 
ble, what thing will keep in the mind of the receiver the most 
pleasant remembrances of the giver. The latter should be sure that 
the former has not already the very article which it is proposed to 
send him. It ought to be known whether the proposed gift will 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



519 



be at all agreeable to him. You may send him a very costly book 
of which he has already two or three copies, when he would be de- 
lighted to receive some other book especially useful in his present 
studies. You may send him a picture of which he has already a 
copy, or which is very distasteful to some member of his family. You 
may send him some article of vertu which costs a great deal of 
money ; if he had the money he could buy three or four articles of 
both beauty and use, and put a remembrance of you in each prin- 
cipal room of his house. There would often occur to him the wish 
that he could make this change, and that thought cannot be pleasant. 
But, with all our blundering, let us all keep on giving, and let us 
all take, and let us all cultivate, as far as practicable, judgment and 
delicacy in giving and gracefulness and gratitude in receiving. Be- 
fore another number of this paper shall be issued we trust all its 
readers will have received in Christmas gifts the things they really 
need and such things as will be pleasant unto them ; also the follow- 
ing week in regard to New Year's presents. Above all, we pray 
that they may receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which enrich and 
beautify and make happy, and that, in remembrance of God's 
largest grace to man in giving his only begotten Son unto us, we 
may every day have hearts to say, " Thanks be unto God for his un- 
speakable gift." 



PLEASURE-SEEKING. 



Pleasure-seekers are dreary mortals. They are worn without work. 
They have lost their strength and got nothing in return. 

One reason of this seems to lie in the fact that pleasure is not 
something wmich exists of itself and can exist apart from other 
things. It is generally overlooked that thought can be without 
pleasure, and so can effort of any kind — physical or moral — but there 
can be no pleasure without thought, or without exertion that does 
not aim at pleasure, or without the exercise of the moral powers. 

In this forgetfulness people get up " pleasure-parties," and go 
seeking enjoyment by itself alone. By carriage, by boat, by rail; in 
crowds, in solitudes, in cities, in woods, these seekers go. They go on 
holidays and holy days. They go out in crowds on Sunday to some 



520 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



" grove/' where thousands of other people congregate. They drag 
themselves and toil and dig for pleasure as for hidden gold. They 
do not find it. Their search is a " vexation of spirit," in the sense 
in which Solomon probably used the phrase — a beating of the wind. 

The same is the result with so very many of those who frequent 
our fashionable watering-places simply because they are fashionable. 
It is painful to see the toilsome way those people go, in their con- 
trivances to create pleasure for themselves and others. Hundreds 
come back from the sea-shore and from the watering-places be- 
dragged in body, mind, and spirit, more worn than many a soldier 
when he comes off a campaign. 

The reason is that pleasure is merely a result. We get it when 
we follow other things and lose it when we seek it for itself. If 
personified it seems a coquette. It is poetically represented as a sly 
nymph, who courts those who pay no attention to her, and im- 
mediately flies from any pursuer. The healthful exercise of the body, 
intellect, and heart, in the work which one loves, and is sure will 
prove profitable, always brings pleasure. The steady discharge of 
all duties always brings pleasure. The observance of the amenities 
and courtesies of life always brings pleasure. Recreation, release of 
one's self from work, that one may return to that work with more 
vigor, always brings pleasure. Pleasure is not an independent sound. 
Pleasure is the echo of the song which duty sings while duty works. 
You may see the singer and perceive what makes the song, but where 
are you to go to find what produces the echo ? You who go about 
God's wonderful world, seeking pleasure while neglecting duty, are 
voiceless echo-seekers. Silence has no echoes. The echo is the 
child of sound. Go up and down the mountains and valleys of so- 
ciety, singing the songs of piety and humanity, and from a thousand 
unseen heights there shall pour down into your spirit the echo men 
call pleasure. Pleasure is the answering chant of nature to the songs 
of the human soul. 




THE PASTOR'S STUDY. M 




READING THE SCRIPTURE LESSONS IN CHURCH. 

In some churches the lessons are prescribed by a regular calendar, 
leaving the minister no choice. In others he chooses the lessons 
as he chooses his text. There should be some guiding principles 
in this selection: 

(i) In the first place, let both lessons be selected so as to show the an- 
alogy of faith and the consistency of the spirit in the Old Testament 
and the New. (2) Let the lessons, as far as practicable, bear upon the 
subject of the sermon, showing the Scriptural ground of the main 
argument and appeal in the discourse which is to follow; so prepar- 
ing the people to yield themselves to the sermon, as being thoroughly 
in accord with " the mind of the Spirit in the word of God." (3) The 
lessons should be readable. It is not every part of the Holy Script- 
ures which can be read in public to edification. In choosing the 
lessons, therefore, of two portions of Scripture — either of which 
might meet the requirements stated above — that is to be taken which 
the minister can read with most effect. 

The lessons chosen, the manner of reading them becomes very 
important. 

No portion of public service demands more dignity, gravity, and 
gracefulness. There should be no hurry. The sacred volume is to 
be touched and handled with great respect. There should be no 
turning of the leaves to and fro, as if the reader were uncertain 
as to which were to be the lessons of the day, or were uncertain 
whether the book containing the lesson sought came before or after 



524 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

some other in the order of the canonical books. The leaves must 
not be tumbled or jerked ; the holy volume must not be shoved 
about on the desk by the minister of the sanctuary as a lawyer may 
push about the books of reference he has brought in his green-bag 
to the court-room. I have heard my mother tell how the very man- 
ner in which John Summerfield was accustomed to lay his hand upon 
the Bible increased her reverence for the glorious volume. 

If the minister have not a thorough conviction that the Bible is 
the " word of God," in a sense infinitely superior to that in which 
the phrase can be applied to any other book, he cannot read it aloud 
so as to produce the desired effect. In his tone and cadences there 
must be that indescribable something which makes even a stranger 
feel that the reader is not giving an elocutionary display, is not recit- 
ing merely the words of the man David, of the man Ezekiel, or of 
the man John ; but that he feels to the core of his heart that what 
he reads was spoken by the eternal God — spoken through psalmist, 
prophet, and apostle — to be repeated by preachers of the Gospel down 
to the end of ages. If he has ideas of Elohistic and Jehovistic 
authorship in any measure weakening his faith in the paramount 
divine authorship of that which he is reading, he cannot make his 
public reading of Genesis more spiritually edifying than his public 
reading of Thucydides, nor give to the book of Job more effective- 
ness than he can impart to one of the tragedies of ^Eschylus. In 
some pulpits the minister appropriately introduces the reading by 
saying, " Hear the word of the Lord! " and then names the book 
and chapter. The people must believe that he believes that it is 
" the word of the Lord " in very truth. 

This profound conviction of the inspiration of the Bible will not 
show itself by mouthing the phrases, as if they were too holy or awful 
to be pronounced or enunciated in the way the vernacular is usually 
spoken by scholarly and well-bred people. This mouthing shows 
itself sometimes in the utterance of the name of the heavenly 
Father. It does not increase our reverence to have him called 
" Gaud," nor as if his name were the word " Got" with the '* t " flat- 
tened. The fashion has been recently imported into New York of 
dividing the name of the Lord into two syllables. It is frequently 
heard in Irish pulpits also. Hearers might suspect an American 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 525 

minister of affectation if they heard him say, " The earth is the 
Low-woods and the fullness thereof." It seems to spoil the reading 
of the Holy Scriptures to make a point of bringing out fully the 
" ed" with which many words end. The bad rule is followed by 
many of making that syllable distinct wherever it occurs. The rea- 
son assigned is that the Bible must not be read like any other book. 
That statement is true so far as the manner and spirit of the reader 
are concerned ; but it is not true if applied to the pronunciation 
and enunciation. In these respects the English Bible must be 
read aloud as any other English book is read aloud. One 
of the most trying of human experiences is to be compelled 
to listen to the lessons as they are ordinarily read in churches 
of the English Establishment. It is simply disgraceful. There 
is no attempt to convey any sense whatever. The theory seems 
to be that every hearer knows precisely every word that is read, 
and the reading is "gone through" simply to conform to some 
law, just as clerks of legislative assemblies rapidly and perfunctorily 
read a document which must be read, but which every member has 
studied in advance from a printed copy. It sometimes becomes 
ludicrous, and I have noticed that the " ed" termination seemed to 
increase the ridiculousness. Fancy a man reading with a rapidity 
which renders him breathless the following passage, sing-songing all 
along: "But it displeas-f<f Jonah exceedingly, and he was very 
angry " [rising inflection]. "And he pray-^unto the Lord " [rising 
inflection]. "'But God prepar-^ a worm when the morning rose 
next day, and it smote the gourd that it wither-^" [rising inflec- 
tion], etc., etc. 

Great care should be taken in preparing to read the lessons. On 
the stage men deliver passages of Shakespeare over which they have 
spent hours of careful study. " What did the writer mean ? " " How 
can I deliver this passage so as to convey fully and impressively the 
author's thought to the hearer? " He is the truest artist who comes 
nearest to finding the right answer to those two questions. The 
minister must study his passage closely, frequently, and with prayer. 
With prayer, because he is not a theatrical artist whose aim is simply 
to ascertain and convey the intellectual and sentimental conception 
of the author, but he has also to convey the spiritual significance. 



526 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

Conscientious study of the Scriptures, especially in the original lan- 
guages, will enable him to do the former, and prayer will aid him in 
the latter. 

The nature of the passage must be considered. Portions that 
are written dramatically must be read dramatically, and the great 
historical and doctrinal portions must be read with deliberation, 
dignity, and elevation of tone. It would be a mistake to read the 
parable of the prodigal son in the key and with the tone one should 
employ in delivering the first chapter of Genesis or the first eighteen 
verses of the Gospel of John. Indeed, that first chapter of John 
gives a great variety. At the nineteenth verse a total change of tone 
is required, and in the thirty-three remaining verses there are four 
distinct interviews recorded, each differing from the others in marked 
characteristics and requiring a corresponding difference in reading. 
A man who can read properly the first chapter of John's gospel 
can read properly any thing in the Bible. The first verse is crucial. 
I confess to having spent a quarter of a century in striving to learn 
to read it, but I am not now so confident of my reading as to insist 
upon it. But this verse is a good verse for practice. Is it meant 
to tell what there was at the moment when the first created things 
had a beginning? If so, that requires a certain reading. Or is the 
intent of the writer to set forth a strong assertion of the pre-exist- 
ence of the Logos? If so, then a different reading is demanded. 
How should we read the last phrase in the verse : " The Word was 
God," or "The Word was God}" 

Do not fix any one reading for any one passage as unchangeable. 
As you obtain new light on the word you must change your read- 
ing ; for every passage should be read, as far as practicable, with 
argumentative effect. Every minister should seek to produce as 
much effect, to say the least, by the lessons as by the sermons ; and 
this writer is not ashamed to have his brethren know that he often 
devotes more time to the preparation of the lessons than of the ser- 
mon. As he grows older he corrects his readings more frequently 
than he did in the days of his youthful ministry. 

There is that wonderful fifteenth of First Corinthians. It is in 
the burial service of several of the Churches. We all know the 
most of it " by heart," and some of us have repeated it fifty times 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 527 

a year. Until last year I had invariably read the fifty-second verse 
so as to convey a meaning which may be quite different from the 
really intended significance. This was my reading, if I can convey 
it in type : " We shall not all SLEEP, but we shall all BE CHANGED.'' 
That is the reading suggested by the English version ; conveying the 
idea that some shall sleep and some shall not sleep, but that all, 
both those who sleep and those who do not, shall be changed. But 
a moment's inspection of the Greek shows this is, at least, a doubt- 
ful interpretation. The persons of whom the affirmation is made in 
the first instance seem to be the very same persons of whom the 
second affirmation is made: "All we" shall — not sleep; but, "all 
we" shall — be changed. It is not my purpose to be exegetical. This 
passage is cited simply to show that a man must settle the meaning 
of what he is to read, and to convey that meaning by his emphasis 
and tones. The proper reading of a passage of Holy Scripture 
should be very expository of that passage. 

And, touching that chapter, we are reminded of a general, and, 
we think, mistaken, reading of the passage which immediately fol- 
lows the one just mentioned : " For this mortal must put on immor- 
tality." [It is usually read as we have marked it.] Now, if the 
question were, "What is to succeed this mortal?" there could be 
no objection to this reading. But the apostle states this as an abso- 
lutely certain and necessary thing ; and, because it is so certain, 
therefore we must be changed at the last trump. The glorious inev- 
itability is brought out by a most triumphant emphasizing of the 
" must " : " For this corruptible MUST put on incorruption, and 
this mortal MUST put on immortality!" 

The personal pronouns are important. They may be emphasized 
so as to give great comfort, or so as to produce most ludicrous effects. 
The former is the case when Luther's rule is applied to the phrases 
which appropriating faith can use to bring the Lord and his mercies 
very near to the soul; as, "Thou art my God." "My Lord and my 
God." But when Thomas uttered that exclamation did he not 
place the emphasis on " Lord " and " God " because it was forced 
from him by the sudden conviction of Christ's divinity? 

The ludicrousness of a mistake in emphasizing pronouns may be 
shown by an incident which actually occurred. A friend of mine 



528 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



who is incumbent in one of the principal livings in the Church of 
England told me last summer that the Irish clergy had, he thought, 
a general tendency to emphasize the personal pronouns as a rule. 
He said that one Sunday, while sitting in his chancel in sight of the 
congregation, he suffered by his effort to suppress his risibility while 
a brother clergyman from Ireland read the lessons. The first morn- 
ing lesson was I Kings xiii. The reader accented the pronouns as 
they came until the reading became ridiculous ; it was, however, 
tolerable until he reached the thirteenth verse, which he rendered 
very emphatically, " And he said unto his sons, Saddle me the ass. 
So they saddled him the ass." 

In all our reading, as in all our preaching, we are to remember 
that we are the heralds of salvation, the bringers of glad tidings, 
whose whole work is to lead men " to know the love of Christ, which 
passeth knowledge." We may make false representations of God 
by our manner of reading his word to others quite as effectively as 
by distinct statements. It is told that a gentleman had read the 
denunciatory speeches of Jesus, the "woe unto you, scribes and 
Pharisees ; hypocrites," the "woe unto you, blind guides," the "ye 
serpents ! ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation 
of hell?" until Jesus seemed to him a person of uncontrollable 
temper, breaking forth into vituperation. One day he heard a min- 
ister read the twenty-third chapter of Matthew, in which these fright- 
ful phrases occur. That minister had a very different conception of 
the character of Jesus. To him the Lord was a living Saviour, always 
filled with grief for sinners, rather than with wrath. To him Jesus 
seemed to have a breaking heart, as he contemplated the spiritual 
condition of men who could " devour widows' houses," while " for 
a pretense" they made " long prayers," and tears seemed to trickle 
through his syllables as he sorrowfully lamented over the " greater 
condemnation " which should befall them. The minister's reading 
of the passage made a new revelation of the Lord ; and those very 
phrases which had made Christ seem repulsive to him he now saw- 
meant only riches of grace and tenderness and compassion. 

It is an unseemly thing for a minister to be denunciatory. He 
must live under the conviction that he is a sinner preaching to brother 
sinners, and his word is to warn, entreat, and instruct. What unut- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 529 

terable pathos should struggle in our voices as we read to our fellow- 
men, "Then shall he say unto them on the left hand, Depart!" 
How almost hushed should be our voices as we whisper the sentence 
of doom, " These shall — go away into — everlasting punishment ! " 
Who could endure to hear a burly man shout these words as if he 
rejoiced to know that there was such a fate for some men, while he 
shook his head in triumph as if he would thereby imply that " it 
served them right ! " Such a reader, by his appearance and tones, 
would remind us of the probable behavior of the devil at the doom 
of the damned, but certainly not of the conduct of that Jesus who 
"gave himself, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God," and 
" who will have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge 
of the truth." 

But no culture will avail if its processes are carried on in the pul- 
pit during the service. The practice and the drill must be in private, 
until not only correctness, but accuracy, become so a second nature 
that the minister shall take no thought of his manner. When he 
comes to his work he must not have to think whether his verbs 
agree with their subjects ; whether his inflections should be rising or 
falling ; whether he has on vest or suspenders or socks or boots. 
His dress and his address are matters for private culture. Ascend- 
ing the pulpit, he is to employ all the culture he has already acquired. 
He is to be penetrated with the feeling that he is the mouthpiece 
of the eternal God, and that the message he utters to others is 
addressed personally to himself. " The soul that sinneth, it shall 
die ! " I am reading that from the pulpit ; it is not carried from 
God by me to that sinful woman, to that notoriously wicked man, as 
a postman carries a sealed letter in which he has no interest beyond 
its safe delivery ; it is addressed to me quite as much as to them. If 
I do not take it to heart, when the time comes for my sinful soul to 
die I shall have this to increase my agony: that I had been warned, 
that I studied the warning, and that my own lips had repeatedly 
uttered the warning, " The soul that sinneth, it shall die ; " and my 
careless reading of the Holy Scripture will enhance my condemna- 
tion. 

A man that cultivates sentiments like these cannot go into the 
pulpit and run over the tremendous words of the Most High God 



530 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

as if he were calling off the column of a bank's daily receipts to 
have it tallied, or mechanically reading the slips of a proof-sheet 
to have it corrected. 

One of the most important and solemn duties of the Christian min- 
ister is to read God's holy zvords in the midst of the congregation. How 
are we to regard a man who thinks more of the delivery of his own 
words than of God's? 

[A Note. — In one of the earlier paragraphs of this article I have 
written " Jehovistic." This is, comparatively, a modern word in our 
English. It is commonly used by biblical critics on both sides of 
" inspiration." Is it a correct word ? Should it not be " Jehovistic ? " 
" Elohistic " has legitimate descent ; but has " Jehovistic ?" I ask 
for information.] 



PREACHERS AND REPORTERS. 
First Paper. 

Forty years ago Mr. Francis Hall, the then venerable proprietor 
of the New York Commercial Advertiser, took great interest in a 
church in Vestry Street. Its pastor was his neighbor and intimate 
friend. So far as I know, an announcement in the Advertiser on a 
certain Saturday in 1839, °f the sermon to be delivered by that 
clergyman on the following day, was the beginning of the interest 
in religious services which has grown up in the secular press. 

The next step in the development was the purchase of a certain 
space in the paper by a well-known philanthropist, who filled it for 
one year with religious matter. When he went to renew his contract 
the kind of matter which he had furnished had become so interest- 
ing to the readers of the newspapers that the proprietors were only 
too glad to insert it gratuitously. In the beginning the publishers 
were very thankful to receive announcements of the public services, 
which they published gratuitously as important news. They charged 
for religious matter because they doubted whether their readers 
would endure it under any other guise than that of advertisement. 
In forty years matters have totally changed. A church must pay 
for an advertisement that its minister is going to preach, while the 
journal will pay a reporter to obtain an account of the discourse 
when delivered. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 53 1 

There has thus grown up a relation between the pulpit and the 
press the value of which thoughtful men are not slow to discern 
and acknowledge. It is plain to be seen that a very great deal can 
be accomplished if the people generally come to read the discourses 
delivered by the preachers, provided these discourses be full of the 
truth and are reported in such a manner as to produce a wholesome 
impression. It is also plain to be seen that there will be evils attend- 
ing this arrangement. Preachers will be tempted to desire notoriety. 
They will be tempted to be "sensational " in the bad sense of that 
word. Every real preacher is " sensational " in the good sense of 
the term. That sermon is worthless which produces no sensation of 
love, or hate, or fear, or hope, or joy, or aspiration. Sensationalism 
is to be denounced only where the preacher strives to produce a 
sensation for the sake of the sensation itself, without regard to ulte- 
rior beneficial influence upon the character and the life. 

It is a natural and not unlaudable desire that what a man has 
delivered from the pulpit he should wish might reach as many per- 
sons as possible. The late Dr. James Hamilton, of London, repeat- 
edly delivered a series of sermons, which he afterward embodied in 
books. Our beloved brother, the Rev. Dr. Taylor, of this city, has 
done the same thing. He would be a strangely-constituted man 
who should blame either of these ministers for that course. Now, 
as they took pains to prepare their sermons for the press in book- 
form, they might desire that those sermons should be reproduced 
through the press as variously as possible. 

It is not to be supposed that the good men who do these things 
are seeking merely notoriety. They are not unwilling to be known, 
but the great object is to diffuse the truths which seem to them to 
be so very important. 

It has been alleged that preachers have sometimes bought their 
way into the daily press ; have had private understandings with 
reporters, and even paid them certain sums to secure a space in the 
public prints. If that be true it is wholly outside the knowledge of 
this writer, who has heard it, but not from any minister of the Gospel, 
nor from any trustworthy reporter. It may, therefore, be treated as 
unworthy of credit. Ministers have been known who, if they had 
only been informed what report was to be made of their sermons 



532 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

in the Monday morning papers, would gladly have given five dollars 
out of their narrow stipend to suppress such report. 

We believe that, generally, clergymen are dissatisfied with the 
reports of their discourses. That can be accounted for on several 
grounds. One is that no report ever comes up to their ideal ; which 
is also true, in point of fact, of the very sermon itself. Another is 
that, when the report goes into the office, in the hurry of the make- 
up the article is cut down to suit the space left in the form. This 
cutting is done very often arbitrarily. By the gaslight at midnight 
an editor runs rapidly over the sermon, which takes three quarters 
of a column, in order to cut it down one third, because only a half 
column can be given. The result is often that the whole connection 
of thought is lost, and no person who did not hear the discourse 
could see any drift in the report. If the reporter himself could only 
do this work of cutting down and adjusting the parts it would be 
better done, and still better if done by the clergyman. 

Some time ago one of the reporters brought me a sketch he had 
made of my morning sermon. I read it over and did not change a word, 
because I saw that if I commenced I should have to re-write the 
whole; but I did mark the portion which ought to be published if 
any portion at all were reported. I did that as a journalist. Hav- 
ing been connected with the press, off and on, since I was twelve 
years of age, I ought to have a little skill in that line. The portion 
I marked to be printed was the least edifying of any thing I had said 
that morning, but it was the very thing, I am sure, which would 
have struck newspaper readers. The portion that was finally printed 
was that which was, probably, the most edifying to my congregation 
as delivered, but, as reported, had the least snap and juice in it. 
Intelligent readers at a distance must have wondered how any man 
that delivered the matter that was reported could have collected 
even fifty people in the city of New York to listen to him. I saw 
at a glance next morning that whoever made up the paper had cut 
down the report without reading it, or, if he had read it, he was 
unfit to have charge of that department. 

Another reason why the clergyman is discontented with the news- 
paper's report is that ordinarily the very portion which the preacher 
wishes to go to the public is suppressed. The reason of this is 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 533 

quite manifest. In the main that which seems most important 
to the clergyman does not to the reporter, on account of the 
difference in their intellects and their education. The preacher 
educates himself up to prepare sermons .that shall make immediate 
impressions upon a multitude of people listening to his voice and 
seeing his person, while the reporter educates himself into seizing 
that which, when printed, will make the mass of readers desire to 
have more of the same kind. This seems to be an important dis- 
tinction. A sermon is not an essay. Preaching is one thing and 
printing is another. The more nearly the discourse is ready for the 
press the further is it removed from what the preacher wants in the 
pulpit. Reading is one thing, hearing is another. We prepare to 
have read that which we wish to produce frequent, or, at least, 
repeated, impressions as there are repeated readers. But what a 
real preacher prepares for the pulpit is that which is to be expended 
then and there, and can only be reproduced as the showers which 
are shed upon the field go partly into vegetation and are partly 
evaporated. How can a preacher read ? He must look his audience 
in the eye. He has come into the pulpit with a certain great truth, 
and his aim is to fix that truth in the convictions of his hearers by 
every reasonable method at his command. In the pulpit he is not 
the chief-justice reading an opinion. He is the advocate. The 
congregation are the jurors. Whatever else in that hour is done, 
or fails to be done, he is bound to win that jury to his side. He 
will enlighten them, hammer them, persuade them, will repeat 
his sentences over and over; throw them into new shapes; will 
pass quickly from the learned, the intelligent, the gifted, from 
the lawyers and poets in his assembly to the stolid face back yon- 
der that looks as if the mind behind it saw men as trees walking ; 
and he will work over that particular mind until he sees that his 
thought has irradiated that intellect. He will wrestle with his con- 
gregation. He will not have satisfied himself with presenting a 
statement that can be calmly read in the libraries of his rich 
parishioners and appear without blemish or rhetorical flaw. He 
is not spangling, he is not starring, he is striving to save souls; 
and you might just as well try to report the thunder made by 

the drop of Niagara, or the breathing of a wrestler in his agony, 
34 



534 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

as to report such parts of a sermon as are the living parts of a 
sermon. 

Still there are uses in reporting what can be reported. If we can- 
not make living men we can, at least on canvas and in marble, 
make some approach toward a representation of those parts of the 
man which can be perceived by the senses. For purposes of art 
these presentations are useful. Therefore reporting of sermons will 
go on. It behooves us to study how to make this connection be- 
tween the pulpit and the press profitable to both parties. 



PREACHERS AND REPORTERS. 
Second Paper. 
Being both- a journalist and a preacher, we venture to suggest 
that the newspapers should make some change in their methods. 
It is evidently unpractical to send a man to be a reporter of 
sermons when the man himself is an infidel or notoriously irreligious. 
It were like sending a man thick of hearing to report a concert, or 
a purblind writer to report a gallery of paintings. There must be 
sympathy between the preacher and the hearer. It might be well 
to secure in each church some intelligent member thereof who 
knows the habits of thought of the pastor and is accustomed to 
his deliverances. Such a one, other things being equal, might be 
better trusted to produce a report having some vraisemblance, to 
him who remembers the delivered discourse. In the next place, a 
reporter of sermons ought to have some theological education. 
The most earnest preachers, even if endowed with a large measure 
of common sense, may not be able entirely to avoid the phrases of 
their " studies." Lawyers do not, physicians do not. Now, if a man 
should be sent to report a law-case he ought to have some little 
acquaintance with legal phrases, or else the statements of the 
bench and bar will make a wrong impression upon his mind, and, 
without intending to make a false representation, the reporter may 
misrepresent the whole argument. If journalism is to be improved 
in every department it may be suggested that the proprietors of 
our great dailies select several excellent young men, and let them 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 535 

receive a few lectures from certain ministers who could show these 
reporters how the ministers themselves would report particular 
sermons. Any clergyman would be glad to give a couple of hours 
to any young gentleman of good principles who wanted to be an 
ecclesiastical reporter. He could show him how the sermons are 
constructed, under what circumstances they are delivered, what 
portions were for immediate effect, and how much of them could be 
preserved for the public. 

As it is now, sometimes a reporter not only has not the specific 
training which enables one to see the perspective of a discourse, but 
often he is not practiced in general reporting. Sometimes such a 
writer is sent to several churches on the same morning. He runs 
into one for the beginning of a sermon ; into the second for the 
end of a sermon, and then throws himself upon the kindness of the 
pastor of the third to help him through. As an illustration I may 
mention a circumstance which occurred on the Sunday previous to 
this writing. I was in my study a half hour before the commence- 
ment of the evening service. A young man sent in his name as a 
reporter of the daily press. Having sympathy with their work, and 
having generally found them clever fellows, I always admit re- 
porters. When the visitor entered he seemed to me very young 
for his business ; but that did not discourage me, as I have found, 
occasionally, a mere boy who has had a certain kind of instinct 
which made him better adapted to the press than some of the 
oldest workers. He stated his case simply. He had been up all 
night, and had been assigned to the Cathedral, the Church of the 
Disciples, and the Church of the Strangers for the Sunday morn- 
ing. He did not tell me what he did with the other two churches, 
but he had not been able to reach mine. And so he came to beg 
me just to give him two or three of my most " striking sentences," 
as he called them, so that he could make some report. I took com- 
passion upon the young man, and spent twenty minutes in dictating 
to him a brief analysis of the discourse, throwing in one or two 
sentences in a shape that I supposed might be " taking " to the 
general reader. But, upon the whole, that hasty thing was the best 
report of the discourse which appeared next day. I gave that at 
the risk of switching my mind off the track of the evening's dis- 



536 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

course, and do not think that I can afford to repeat that experi- 
ment frequently. 

It seems worthy of consideration on the part of the conductors of 
newspapers whether it would not be better to let the preachers 
report their own discourses. A certain space is set apart each 
Monday morning for certain churches. Might not arrangements be 
made with the minister that he shall provide the report — which he 
may write himself, or have written by some one who is familiar 
with his style ? And that suggests that a reporter must be familiar 
with the modes of thought and expression of the man whom he is 
reporting. No matter how competent a stenographer may be, nor 
how accurately he may take down every word of the speaker, he 
must fail to present the life and spirit of the speaker himself unless 
he be acquainted with his modes of thought. In the case of an 
extemporaneous speaker this is eminently true. Each word may 
be taken, and in the order of its utterance, and yet the sermon re- 
main unreported. The color is not there ; the life is not there. It 
is a transparent vase without the burning lamp inside. 

In this I once had a lesson which may interest the readers. I felt 
that there must be a good deal of ragged rhetoric in sermons de- 
livered from mere notes and uttered with fervor to a large assembly. 
To test it in my own case I procured the services of a gentleman 
recommended to me as one of the most rapid and accurate stenog- 
raphers on the continent. He had been in the employ of Mr. 
Seward during a busy portion of his life as a member of the Presi- 
dent's Cabinet. I told this gentleman that some morning I wished 
him to come and write out for me one of my sermons, preserving 
ipsissima verba, correcting no grammatical errors, arid mending no 
rhetorical flaws, as I desired to read the very words I had spoken 
in their order of utterance. He did so. It happened to be on a 
Sunday morning when a discourse was delivered of which I think 
I have heard more than of any other sermon I have preached in 
New York. His manuscript was a study to me. I recognized its 
exactitude, my memory recalling even slips of the tongue which he 
had carefully preserved as per contract. I may be permitted to say 
that the sermon manifestly stirred the congregation ; but I thor- 
oughly believe that there was not a man of intelligence in that 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 537 

audience who would not have denounced the reported sermon 
as being a caricature. The looks, the gesture, the voice, the excite- 
ment of the delivery carried them so over the ground that they had 
no time to perceive the roughness of the draft that lay beneath 
their feet. Hundreds of dollars would not have bribed me to pub- 
lish that report with my name attached to it as the author of the 
sermon. It would have ruined my reputation ; and yet I should be 
unspeakably delighted to be assured that I should be able, at least 
once a month during the rest of my ministry, to preach as I 
preached that morning. " Preaching is one thing, and reading is 
another," is a phrase to be often quoted, because it contains a prin- 
ciple to be often noted. 

I would not be considered immodest, but learning, as I am, some 
lessons from this relation of the press and pulpit, I venture to sug- 
gest to my clerical brethren that the very suffering which we endure 
in looking over the reports of our discourses ought to lead us to 
reflect whether our sermons are, in their manner of composition 
and delivery, just what they should be. We go before a crowd of 
twelve or fifteen hundred people, more or less, every Sunday, to 
preach the Gospel. We don't preach for fame. We don't want any 
one to say : " What a splendid sermon !" We do desire to plant 
the truth in the convictions of our hearers and to commend our- 
selves to every man's conscience in the sight of God. To commend 
ourselves to every man's conscience must we not commend our- 
selves to every man's intellect ? When we have commended our- 
selves to the intellect of those who are the most gifted have we 
commended ourselves to the intellect of those who are very much 
less gifted ? When we have commended ourselves to the plainest 
man in our congregation have we not commended ourselves to all 
men? Now, should not our sermons be of such a character that all 
our hearers of ordinary education should be able to get the gist of 
the matter, and, by writing it down on the spot, be able to give an 
intelligent statement thereof? 

A young man who does some writing for me, in preparing maga- 
zine articles at my dictation, said, in reply to a criticism upon the 
breaks in one of his transcripts : " Well, these Church articles are 
the very mischief." When catechised as to what he meant by that, 



538 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

and why he should have difficulties here that were not in other 
articles, it came out that he perceived that it required an education 
broader than that possessed by most reporters in order to repre- 
sent, fairly, language uttered upon subjects outside the range of 
current events of common interest to the people. This is un- 
doubtedly true ; but, until reporters have that higher education, do 
they not represent the unhighly-educated mass of people? And 
should we not be careful to reach them ? 

Now, it must be remembered that the uneducated mass of people 
are not people in poor, unfashionable, and country churches alone. 
Sometimes they are there, but they are also in our richest congrega- 
tions. Money does not make education. There are as many un- 
educated men and women worshiping in the churches on the most 
fashionable avenue in New York as can be found, probably, in the 
same number of churches in America that lie along in a line, in city 
or country. But they must be taught ; they must be convinced ; 
they must be roused up ; they must be saved. If we fail to make 
ourselves understood by the reporter is it likely we succeed in 
making ourselves understood by the mass of our hearers? 

It is true that in preaching we are to forget the distinctions of 
reporter and lawyer and merchant, and educated and uneducated. 
We are to set ourselves to the great work of saving souls ; and the 
man who conscientiously and earnestly studies to do this need give 
little attention to the preservation of his reputation for intellect or 
eloquence. A man may be misrepresented every Monday morning, 
dreadfully misrepresented, and be made to appear an idiot in the 
reports of the newspapers ; but if he have intellect, if he have learn- 
ing, if he have skill, if he have a good heart, and, above all, if he 
have the unction of the Holy One, hungry people will come to him 
for the bread of truth, and thirsty people will crowd around him for 
the water of spiritual life. 

It is well for us to remember that, in our studies and in our 
pulpits, there is a Reporter that not only takes down our words, 
but records our thoughts; whose phonograph will repeat through 
eternity not only our phrases, but our very tones, and whose sensi- 
tive "negative " will photograph not simply the features of our face 
and the expression thereof, but also the very lineaments of our 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 539 

characters. Let us preach the word under a solemn sense of our 
dread responsibility and with a conscious appreciation of the im- 
mense spiritual resources that are ready to come to our aid ; and 
whatever men may say or fail to say, whether it become distorted in 
report or drop into obscurity, we know that our labor is not in vain. 



UNCHALLENGED SPEAKERS. 

It is sometimes stated as an advantage peculiar to clergymen that 
they have the whole ground to themselves, and can deliver their 
addresses without standing in any fear of a challenge. Sometimes 
their brethren of the bar speak of this to preachers as a thing 
favorable to them. 

But is not this a mistake ? Is it not a serious disadvantage to a 
modern preacher that there is no one to arrest him in the course of 
talk that may be disorderly, or sit watching him in preparation of 
reply ? Is not the fact that he is to speak with authority what his 
hearers are to receive with submission calculated to do him a posi- 
tive injury?' 

A preacher ought to speak with authority. He is an embassador 
from God. But just because he is such an embassador he ought 
to take the utmost care in preparing himself to deliver that mes- 
sage so that there shall be no mistake as to the intent of his august 
Sovereign. Do we not, however, sometimes see that just the con- 
trary effect is produced? A man becomes utterly careless just be- 
cause there is no one to call him to account. 

It would be considered a strange thing in a metropolitan church 
to have an intelligent hearer rise at the close of the sermon and 
traverse the argument and sift the rhetoric of the preacher who had 
just taken his seat. But would sermons be just as they are now if 
the preacher knew that some such thing were likely to happen ? 
Would he not be careful in the preparation of his sermons to see 
that they were real arguments and not fallacies? Would he not be 
careful to prepare himself with proofs of things which he stated as 
facts? Would he not study to make his appeals to the passions 
such as they should be ? 



54Q 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



Such a state of affairs has existed. Some years ago among the 
churches to which the writer of this article ministered in North 
Carolina was one called " Smith's Chapel." It would seat about 
two hundred white and one hundred colored people. But in that 
climate, a large part of the year, a considerable portion of the con- 
gregation sat outside. The nearest house to the little chapel was 
the dwelling of a gentleman who was one of the most famous 
school-teachers in his native State. He was the college-mate of 
James K. Polk, and the first time we ever saw him was when he 
had just completed a walk of nearly fifty miles to meet his old 
college friend at the university. 

Mr. John G. Elliot got his middle initial from his resemblance to 
a ghost. He was usually known as " Mr. Ghost Elliot." Small, 
thin, washed out by multitudinous ablutions, built after the archi- 
tectural design of an interrogation mark, with a disproportionately 
large head, the white hair on which was cropped to a length 
measured exactly by the thickness of the comb, he was a man whose 
appearance attracted attention every-where. In some departments 
he was very learned, and his solid acquirements dominated his 
eccentricities and won for him the respect of a large class of citi- 
zens. He was what the colored people would call " a powerful 
hearer of de word." Upon warm days he would walk into the 
meeting-house, throw his coat, if he had one, over the back of his 
seat, pull off his shoes to cool his understanding, and, propping his 
head against his left hand, and supporting his left elbow with his 
right hand, he set himself to penetrate the speaker with auger eyes. 
The thing his soul most hated was nonsense. He had no kind of 
reverence. He would take up a slave or the Archbishop of Canter- 
bury with equal patience and, by Socratic methods, exhibit to him 
the ridiculousness of his errors. 

If within the reach of practicability Mr. Ghost Elliot was always 
at any service within his range conducted by this writer. There 
are readers of this volume in North Carolina who, when they 
peruse this article, will recollect how sometimes when an assertion 
had been roundly made by the preacher Mr. Elliot would rise in his 
place and say : " Doctor, what is supposed among theologians to be 
the proof of that?" Or, " Doctor, I have heard that circumstance 



FOR E VER Y FIRESIDE. 54 1 

stated quite differently." Or, " Doctor, that statement of yours 
has been publicly denied in the papers." 

There was no laughing. Mr. Elliot was the oracle of that neigh- 
borhood. There were boys about there whom his skeptical ideas 
had infected. There were people in that audience not to be sur- 
passed in what is called " a Boston audience," and Joseph Cook 
never ran a severer gauntlet in the Athens of America than the 
young professor from the university ran in that chapel in the pine 
woods. No one laughed ; every one listened, and if Mr. Elliot had 
frequently got the better of the preacher the preacher's occupation 
would have been gone. 

To this day we feel the healthy influence of that instantaneous 
criticism. To this day, in preaching, every now and then it occurs 
to us that, somewhere in the church, there may be a " Ghost Elliot," 
who does not " speak out in meeting," but carries the objection 
away in his soul. Would it not be better that men should speak 
out? 

Would it not sometimes be better that preachers should have at 
least once a month a sermon open to question and open to reply ? 
Would it not puncture the gas-bags ? Would it not lead ecclesias- 
tical engineers to know the weak spots in their fortifications ? Would 
it not really be better that a man of learning and ability should 
have an opportunity to meet and answer the objection on the spot 
than that the hearer, creating an objection in his own heart or 
mind, should go away feeling that no one could answer it ? 

We are not prepared to say that that would be a practicable thing ; 
but we do know that unchallenged speaking is not advantageous to 
the pulpit. 

We learn what preaching is needed by the drawing from our 
people in private their objections, their difficulties, and their doubts. 
Now and then a real good, honest doubter — a man quite as ready to 
doubt doubts as to doubt doctrine — frankly expressing his opinion, 
might be of considerable service to the cause of preaching. 



542 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

LONG SERMONS.. 

Of late the secular press has been very kind to clergymen in giv- 
ing them instructions as to the length of their sermons. The whole 
tenor of these homilies is to the effect that sermons ought to be 
shorter. Sometimes the clergy are instructed to take their sermons 
and go into their studies and boil them down, taking out the light 
wind and froth, so that nothing shall be left that is not solid matter. 

We do not feel unkindly toward these criticisms. They evidently 
proceed from the most thoroughly sincere ignorance. The writers 
seem to never have known, or to have utterly forgotten, what is 
the function of a preacher. They seem to think that he is simply 
an official paid to conduct a necessary service, and that it is only 
necessary that the service be performed, and nothing whatever de- 
pends upon the manner or the effect. It is as if the hearers were 
compelled to receive from the minister a certain document, and that 
if it stated a certain thing in any way it would be sufficient. Of 
course, in that case, if the hearer were pushed for time, the more 
quickly the document were written the better. But such is not the 
case. 

A preacher is supposed to be a man who believes with all his 
heart certain doctrines which it is necessary for his fellow-men to 
believe, in order to lead them to the manliest lives upon earth and 
the loftiest lives after death. He is to carry those convictions into 
the minds of his hearers. It is absolutely necessary that those con- 
victions be so transferred. If they are not the preacher's ministry 
is a failure, and his hearers are no better for the hearing. It does 
not matter in what way the preacher gets those convictions into 
the minds and hearts of his hearers. He must try every plan, state 
and re-state his propositions in every way, and not rest until he has 
carried the citadel of his hearer's conscience. 

Now, for a man to be limited in point of time in doing this is 
absurd. Of course the more swiftly he can do it the better for all 
parties ; but he must be the judge of that. 

It is as if a surgeon were going to perform an operation, and were 
limited in time ; he knows that the operation must not be prolonged 
one single unnecessary second, but of the time to be occupied he 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 543 

must judge ; and, if it shall require hours to do it successfully, 
having begun he must go through with it. 

It is as if a lawyer had a case before a jury involving millions of 
money, or, what is a more appropriate illustration, the life of his 
client, and were told to " boil it down ; " that twenty minutes is 
sufficient time to detain a jury. The suggestion would be thought 
absurd and the ruling intolerable. The advocate knows that he 
has to keep at that jury until he carries their convictions. 

A case in -point has recently been published, related by one of our 
acutest critics, in regard to one of our greatest advocates. 

Mr. Edwin P. Whipple gives the following account of one of the 
late Mr. Choate's efforts at the bar : 

" On one occasion I happened to be a witness in a case where a 
trader was prosecuted for obtaining goods under false pretenses. 
Mr. Choate took the ground that the seeming knavery of the ac- 
cused was due to the circumstance that he had a deficient business 
intelligence — in short, that he unconsciously rated all his geese as 
swans. He was right in his view. The foreman of the jury, how- 
ever, was a hard-headed, practical man, a model of business intellect 
and integrity, but with an incapacity of understanding any intellect 
or conscience radically differing from his own. Mr. Choate's argu- 
ment, as far as the facts and the law were concerned, was through in 
an hour. Still he went on speaking. Hour after hour passed, and 
yet he continued to speak with constantly-increasing eloquence, re- 
peating and recapitulating, without any seeming reason, facts which 
he had already stated and arguments which he had already urged. 
The truth was, as I gradually learned, that he was engaged in a 
hand-to-hand — or rather in a brain-to-brain and a heart-to-heart — 
contest with the foreman, whose resistance he was determined to 
break down, but who confronted him for three hours with defiance 
observable in every rigid line of his honest countenance. 'You 
fool ! ' was the burden of the advocate's ingenious argument ; ' you 
rascal ! ' was the phrase legibly printed on the foreman's incredu- 
lous face. But at last the features of the foreman began to relax, 
and at the end the stern lines melted into acquiescence with the 
opinion of the advocate, who had been storming at the defenses of 
his mind, his heart, and his conscience for five hours, and had now 



544 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



entered as victor. He compelled the foreman to admit the unpleas- 
ant fact that there were existing human beings whose mental and 
moral constitution differed from his own, and who were yet as hon- 
est in intention as he was, but lacked his clear perception and sound 
judgment. The verdict was 'Not Guilty.' It was a just verdict, 
but it was mercilessly assailed by merchants who had lost money 
by the prisoner and who were hounding him down as an enemy to 
the human race, as another instance of Choate's lack of mental and 
moral honesty in the defense of persons accused of crime. The fact 
that the foreman of the jury that returned the verdict belonged to 
the class that most vehemently attacked Choate was sufficient of 
itself to disprove such allegations. As I listened to Choate's argu- 
ment in this case I felt assured that he would go on speaking until 
he dropped dead on the floor rather than have relinquished his 
clutch on the soul of the one man on the jury who he knew would 
control the opinion of the others. 1 ' 

Now, suppose that in this case Mr. Choate had been told to go 
and boil it down. He would have done so ; for the fact was that he 
had done so. His whole argument was presented in sixty minutes. 
He might, perhaps, have presented it in fifty; but he was not there 
to deliver an argument that w r ould be satisfactory to the most intel- 
ligent in the court-room ; he was there to carry conviction to twelve 
jurymen. If one failed to be convinced his whole effort would have 
been wasted. He finished his argument in an hour, but it required 
five hours to do the work he had taken upon himself to perform. 

Any intelligent minister can, in thirty minutes, present to any 
audience on earth, however illiterate or learned, all that has been 
revealed to us which is necessary to be known for any man's salva- 
tion. Why not deliver that and stop ? Because his business is not 
simply to make a statement. He has to win his fellow-men with 
the truth. He has to break the clouds that hang over the most ob- 
scured intellect. He has to tunnel a way for the truth through the 
rockiest heart. " Knowing the terrors of the law," he is to "per- 
suade men." And yet men stand by and tell him to boil it down. 

The very men who give this advice are the very men who need to be 
labored with — are the very men whose spiritual stomachs are so weak 
that to give them the condensed milk of the word would be ruinous. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 545 

Perhaps we have too much preaching. Perhaps some sermons 
are too long. No doubt this is so. Almost any discourse that is 
read soon becomes too long, and if the preacher be not intent in 
conveying his own strong convictions to his audience then two 
minutes are too much time to give to any discourse he can deliver. 
But if he have an argument in him, and if he be carrying his audi- 
ence along with him — so that they take no note of time — he need 
take no note of time, but drive right on, earnestly wrestling down 
their passions and prejudices, bringing the light and truth more and 
more to bear with focal power on the hardest spot of their hearts. 

Such preaching is no child's play. It is no wrestling with flesh 
and blood. It is a spiritual conflict, and the preacher must not 
relax his grip upon the intellect and consciences of his hearers 
because some unfortunate reporter who is compelled to give an 
account of the sermon is looking at his watch to see if he can com- 
plete his notes in time, to reach the train for Coney Island. 

Perhaps a change may come in our methods of preaching. Per- 
haps one sermon a month will be delivered. Perhaps it shall then 
be understood that in that monthly discourse the Christian preacher 
regards his audience as a jury. Having studied all their weak 
points and their strong points through the month he may then 
come into the church to hold them there until he plies every man's 
intellect and conscience with arguments for the divinity of Jesus 
Christ, with exhibitions of their own absolute need of a Saviour, 
and with presentations of the sufficiency of this present infinite 
Saviour, until the last man in the audience shall cry out in his soul 
as the apostate emperor did, " Galilean, thou hast conquered ! " 
and the unanimous verdict of the whole audience shall be, " Christ 
is the Captain of our salvation, and we all follow him." Instruction 
in ethics may occupy a large portion of the remainder of the month 
before the next sermon. But if only one such sermon were delivered, 
and all who believed in Christ as the Lord should engage in 
fervent prayer preparatory to the delivery of the sermon, perhaps 
a great change would come over all our people ; and certainly 
preaching would come to be looked at in a critical light a little 
more sober and becoming than that in which it is ordinarily 
placed by our average newspaper criticism. 



546 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

PAUL'S SLEEPY HEARER. 

One of the most comfortable incidents mentioned in the New 
Testament history is that of the young man who slept while Paul 
preached, and who slept so soundly as to fall from the window into 
the crowd below. This incident is recorded in the twentieth chap- 
ter of the " Acts," and to this day brings comfort both to preachers 
and hearers. 

It is to be remembered that Paul was preaching. Paul the learned, 
the mighty, who had seen Jesus in a vision near Damascus ; who 
had been caught up into the third heaven ; who had heard words 
it is not lawful to utter with human lips ; who had conferred upon 
him the dignity and responsibility of opening the Gospel to the 
Gentile world ; who was to influence the generations after him 
more than all other thinkers and philosophers of his time. This 
Paul was preaching ; he was preaching the unsearchable riches of 
Christ ; he was preaching the glorious Gospel of the Son of God ; he 
was making known the mystery which had been hid from the ages. 
He was doing this with all his power and zeal. No man doubts his 
ability; no man questions his sincerity. He had given up every 
worldly prospect and preferment that he might have the privilege of 
preaching this Gospel. 

It was Paul, and — he was preaching. 

In his audience was a person who was a man, not a woman ; who 
was a young man, not an old man ; and while Paul was preaching 
this young man fell asleep. His name has been preserved. It was 
Eutychus. 

If now and then a modern preacher sees a lid-covered eye, a 
drowsy face, or a nodding head, he goes back with comfort to the 
incident recorded in Holy Scripture, that, while Paul preached, a 
man slept. 

The comfort to the hearer seems to come in this wise : he says to 
himself: " There never was an age in which somebody did not sleep 
in church ; there never was a preacher under whose ministrations 
some one did not slumber. It is not, therefore, with me a singular 
infirmity ; it is common to hearers ; and that I am sleeping is no 
reflection upon the minister in the pulpit, because he will console 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 547 

himself with recollecting the young man, Eutychus, who slept while 
Paul preached." 

But why should either party be concerned about this sleeping ? 
Is it a shame or a sin to sleep in Church ? Certainly in the abstract 
this cannot be answered in the affirmative. The moral quality will 
depend upon the cause of the sleeping. 

If a man has been drinking too much, or eating too much, the 
sin is not in the sleeping, it is in the intemperance or the gluttony 
of the sleeper. If the man has been at some place of amusement 
on Saturday night, so that he did not get sufficient sleep for Sun- 
day, the sin is not in the sleeping, it is in the failure to have slept 
at the right time and in the right place. 

It is always good to sleep. It is God's provision in nature for the 
restoration of our wastes. But we ourselves may push it into 
wrong seasons. If a man has been out on duty the night before, if 
a woman has been watching by her sick child, and neither feels will- 
ing to miss the church service, but goes for what can be enjoyed, 
and sleep comes, there is no good ground for trouble of conscience. 
It was the duty of the hearer to be awake the night before. It is 
his duty to be in church in the morning if there be nothing to pre- 
vent. If he falls asleep during the sermon it is his infirmity. If 
he bumps his head against the pew in front, or tumbles from the 
window, it is his misfortune. But there is no sin in sleeping. 
Every moment of sleep is so much clear gain of life. 

Speaking of sleeping reminds us of an incident in our ministry in 
New York. The service was held in what was then the large chapel 
of the University. It was midsummer, and the day was extraor- 
dinarily hot and close. Before we had reached the chapel our 
standing collar had succumbed, and we felt as if our sermon also 
was melting fast away. Moreover, the people looked very drowsy. 
So when the time for the delivery of the discourse arrived we made 
substantially the following address to our audience : 

" Many of you have been hard at work during the week, and the 
day is exceedingly warm, and you may not feel wakeful through 
the entire discourse. Sometimes hearers have distress of mind be- 
cause they sleep in church. They seem to think that sleeping shows 
a want of either reverence for God or respect for the clergyman, or 



548 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

both. Now, I desire to ease your minds by telling you that in my 
estimation there is nothing like sleep ; that if you put yourselves in 
comfortable positions, and there be any thing in the matter of the 
sermon or the manner of its delivery to soothe you, I shall feel that 
my calling to-day is to soothe you and if I put you to sleep it 
will be a great success. Moreover, so far as God is concerned, I 
call your attention to the saying of the Psalmist, ' He giveth his 
beloved sleep.' Now, then, we shall have no trouble on this ques- 
tion. If I see you sleep I shall know that you are doing well. I 
shall go through the discourse to the best of my ability for the sake 
of those who are really awake — all the same as if you were awake." 

Now, what do you think was the effect of this speech ? The 
whole congregation faced the pulpit and gazed at the preacher with 
the most intense attention. Every man, woman, and child of them 
kept distinctly awake, with eyes looking as if they were hungry ; 
and as for " ourself," we never felt more called upon to feed a 
hungry flock than we did that day. The exertion was exhausting, 
and at the close we discovered that an audience may be obstinate, 
and go by the rule of contraries ; being then most wide awake when 
you are most willing that they should slumber and sleep. 



SLEEPING IN CHURCH. 



The Boston Herald some time ago announced that the Presbyte- 
rian Church authorities in Pennsylvania had been considering the 
subject of sleeping in church. It calls attention to the fact that one 
minister declared sleeping in church to be disrespect to God's house 
and indifference to the worship of the Almighty. Whereupon the 
Herald goes into an amusing chat about how to keep awake in church, 
and holds that there is no good in seeking grace to resist the habit; 
and quotes a good deacon as stating that the only remedy known 
was an active application of a hair-pin by the wife of the sleeper. 
It does not state what the good deacon's theory is as to how 
the wife of the sleeper is to keep awake so as to give him the 
occasional necessary jab with that remarkable portion of the toi- 
lette, which I have recently found to be useful for more things 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 549 

than any other sort of implement belonging to the attire of the 
female sex. 

I have " a few feeble remarks " to make on this subject, which may- 
be helpful according to the reader's state of grace. My personal ex- 
periences are on both sides. I have twice slept in church, once as 
lay-boy, and once as a layman. In the first instance I had ridden in 
company with my father all day. We reached the town of Gettys- 
burg in the evening in time for week-day night service in the Meth- 
odist church, in which denomination my father was a minister of the 
Gospel. I always had a talent for going to meeting, so I went with 
my father. Until the beginning of the sermon I was wakeful ; but 
not long after the preacher had announced his text I began to feel 
drowsy. Stooping forward to the pew in front I put my arm upon 
it and leaned my head on my arm. Now, being a short boy, I 
could barely hold my position on the seat and attain to the place 
of repose in front. In that critical posture I grew heavy with 
sleep, my arm slipped from under me, my head banged against 
the pew, and in an instant I was wider awake than I had been in 
twelve months. 

Miserable hypocrite that I was, I kept my head down as if in de- 
votion, and, when no sign of remark appeared, I slyly peeped out, 
gradually looked up, and behold, there was but one person awake in 
that church, so far as I could discern, except the poor little sleepy 
boy. My father was fast asleep, another minister was plainly asleep, 
the presiding elder in the chancel was asleep. The whole thing be- 
came so funny that I kept wide awake to the close, giving one sen- 
tence to the other fellow that was not asleep and taking the next 
sentence for myself, and so amusing myself with a fair division of the 
discourse. 

On another occasion, when I was in charge of a college in Virginia, 
I invited a bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church to preach in 
our chapel. I think it was near commencement season. At any rate 
there was a platform in the chapel, and, that I might have a good 
view of the bishop, I planted my chair dangerously near the edge of 
the platform. At one point of the discourse I became semi-oblivious 
to all terrestrial things, but still not so sleepy as not to have a sudden 
apprehension that I was about to tumble from the platform down 



550 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

among the pews of the chapel. That suggestion was better to me 
than two hair-pins. 

I think it was in the winter succeeding the incident related in the 
immediately preceding article that a young lady from a distant part 
of the country, whom I met at a social entertainment, did me the 
honor of saying, with great sweetness of utterance, that she had 
heard of me, and had some desire to hear me preach. She looked 
up at me with timid, artless eyes, and murmured, " Doctor, do you 
allow your hearers to sleep in church ? " My answer was, " O, by 
all means! Why should they not? Is it not true always that he 
that sleepeth doeth well ? You will find our pews — if you honor 
us with your presence — very comfortable." 

Now, it so happened that in that young lady's life — and she was in 
high social position — there had come passages the wrong of which 
had never struck her so deeply as to drive her into penitential retire- 
ment, but were such as, if presented to the world, would ruin her 
peace in life. These came to me, and I saw how a person might sin 
in that way and go on without seeing the sinfulness thereof. It be- 
came my duty, and it suited my discourse on Sunday, to depict a 
state of soul like that. My young acquaintance was present, and I 
delivered the sermon with all the skill and power I could command. 
As I proceeded with the analysis of the character in hand now and 
then I caught glimpses of her face, which grew paler and paler. 
And when I endeavored to set that condition of soul in the white 
light of God's gaze she was as pallid as marble. 

As I passed out of the church she encountered me and spoke to 
me, but with none of the flippancy of a few evenings before. I said 
to her, " Well, you have worshiped with us ? " " Yes," said she, with 
deep emphasis. Alluding to her conversation of a few evenings be- 
fore I said, " Did you sleep ? " " Sleep," said she, " I would as soon 
expect to sleep at the judgment-seat of Christ ! " 

It seems to me that there need be no concern about sleeping in 
church. If one is overworked, if sleep be really needed, let the man 
sleep. If there is not enough in the sermon to interest him, let him 
sleep. He is at least out of mischief. But it seems to me that if the 
preacher will always have in mind one person whose case gives him 
a basis for a sermon, or illustration of his subject, one person whom 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE, 55 1 

he desires to confirm in the faith, or one person whom he desires to 
arrest in his evil ways, then that sermon will be likely to find several 
persons of the same class in the congregation, and all the people 
who ought to stay awake will fail to fall asleep. Instead of putting 
pepper on the stove it has been observed that it is much better to 
put the pepper in the sermon. 



ECCLESIASTICAL CHANGES. 

[Written in 1879.] 

Some incidents worth note have recently occurred in American' 
pastoral life. 

Dr. Cyrus D. Foss, President of the Wesleyan University, and well 
known as a thorough-going Arminian of the Wesleyan type of ortho- 
dox, was recently called to the pastorate of a New England Con- 
gregational Church, which call he declined. The Rev. Dr. Behrends, 
a leading Baptist clergyman of the West, and a man of great power 
as a preacher, and a very decided Calvinist in his theology, was called 
to a Congregational church in Providence, R. I., and accepted. The 
Rev. Robert B. Meredith, one of the ablest Methodist preachers in 
Massachusetts, has been called to the pastorate of Philips Congrega- 
tional Church in Boston, and has accepted. * 

The question has been repeatedly asked, What does all this mean? 
Plainly that neither Calvinism nor Arminianism, as a system of the- 
ology, is a bar to a man's entering upon the pastorate of a Congre- 
gational church. But there is no reason to suppose that the holding 
of either system of doctrines is essential to being a pastor of a Con- 
gregational church in New England. Is there any thing of impor- 
tance beyond the personal view of these facts? We think there is. 
We think these things are indications that the bodies of Christian 
people are coming to lay less stress upon a man's acceptance of some 
fixed metaphysical phase of doctrine, and are looking more and more 
to the man's character, qualities, and qualifications. In proportion 
as this shall prevail the modern Church will be approaching the type 

* Rev. Dr. Foss is now (1889) a Bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church, and Drs. Behrends 
and Meredith are pastors of flourishing Congregational Churches in Brooklyn, N. Y. 



55 ' 2 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

Of the Church in apostolic times. Before such ecclesiastical move- 
ments as we have related had occurred Christian people with differ- 
ing views of dogmatic theology had come to have great respect for 
one another. Presbyterians, who are Calvinists, had discovered 
among Methodists, who are Arminians, men of real ability, real 
learning, and real piety. They occasionally had the opportunity of 
being instructed and edified by the ministrations of men who in the- 
ology hold to a form of stating the doctrines of grace which did not 
obtain in their own theological' seminaries. Likewise Methodists, 
who are Arminians, had found among Presbyterian ministers, who 
are Calvinists, men of such high character and deep piety that their 
own faith and hope and charity were greatly improved by the minis- 
trations of their Presbyterian brethren. 

This began to make a great many intelligent people in both 
Churches think that the differences between Calvinists and Arminians 
are differences of metaphysical views, arising from diversities of in- 
tellectual constitution, and that in all things which are necessary to 
be received by the head and the heart for spiritual salvation Calvin- 
ists and Arminians are at one. Some went even further, and began 
to perceive that those Christians grew broader and deeper who had 
the advantage of both sets of ministry, and that, really, one comple- 
mented the other. 

Another ecclesiastical fact attracted some attention. In the Prot- 
estant Episcopal Church in America, and in the Established Church 
of England, a man may be a clergyman and at the same time either a 
supraiapsarian Calvinist or a latitudinarian Arminian. The rector of 
an Episcopal church to-day may be a theologian of the latter class ; he 
may die or be removed to-morrow, and next week his place be sup- 
plied by a rector who is a theologian of the former class. 

This state of affairs has not been found to be injurious to the spir- 
itual culture of the flock, provided that in both cases the men are 
;pure men and are rooted and grounded in those doctrines equally 
received by Calvinists and Arminians. The things upon which they 
agree are essential things. Their differences lie in the opinions which 
they hold of the relation of these essential things in metaphysics. 
Holy men who believe that the divine Son of God was delivered 
for our offenses, and raised again for our justification, and who un- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 553 

fold to their people the unsearchable riches of Christ, are pastors 
and preachers under whom any congregation would thrive. 

Now, if within the pale of one Church, which is episcopal in its 
form of government, Calvinists and Arminians may live and grow 
together, why should this not be the case in the Congregational 
Church? It is not a happy thing for the Church when divisions take 
place about men ; but it is a happy thing for the Church when unions 
take place about men. If schisms are created by the cry, " I am of 
Paul and I am of Apollos," those who create them are carnal. Never- 
theless, it is not to be forgotten that Paul and Apollos are ministers 
" by whom we believed." It is not to be forgotten that Paul planted, 
and Apollos watered, but God gave the increase ; and shall not God 
give the increase if an Arminian plant and a Calvinist water? 

It does not seem to us that it will be a good time for the Church 
if ever ministers become trimmers in order to obtain pastorates. To 
be useful the preacher must be thoroughly seized by a conviction of 
" the truth as it is in Jesus," and preach that truth with directness, 
affection, and force. As to his metaphysics, they are not so impor- 
tant. Christians will come to believe this more and more with the 
advancing years, and congregations will be exhibiting more and more 
breadth of intelligence by calling humble, gifted men to be their pas- 
tors and receiving at their hands the bread of life, dispensed as God 
shall give their pastors ability. 



CHURCH TRIALS. 

It would seem, that the time should have arrived when the grace 
and wisdom of Christian people had discovered some method of 
avoiding the disgrace which usually attaches to church trials. 

These proceedings have the double characteristics of the farce and 
the tragedy. We cannot now remember one that, so far as we can 
perceive, has. resulted in any good ; nor can we recall one which did 
not result in much evil. 

If this be the general observation must it not be accounted for on 
the ground that church trials are radically wrong ? For here the 
question arises whether, in the premises on which church trials are 
usually based, there is need of any action, and, if so, what action 



554 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

shall be taken if church trials be discontinued ? It seems quite plain 
that in all these cases something must be done. 

Take the case of a private member of a church. If he be brought 
to trial there will always be a party formed in his favor. It is impos- 
sible to keep all the bad men out of the Church. A man corrupt at 
heart, but pleasant and plausible in manners, may secure an entrance 
into any church. The more thoroughly corrupt and cunning he is 
the more harm he may do and the more difficult to convict him. In 
the meantime, if he be brought to trial he can put on the air of a 
martyr and thus increase the number of his followers and the in- 
tensity of his devotion. It is on this rock that so many Congrega- 
tional churches have been wrecked and churches with extraordinary 
connectional bands have been injured. 

It seems to us that the radical mistake in this matter is the as- 
sumption that a member of the Church has a right to membership in 
the particular church to which he belongs ; whereas in point of fact 
he has no more right to hold on to a church that does not elevate 
him and is not benefited by him than the church has a right to hold 
on to him if he be unwilling to continue his membership. The 
member of any church can dissolve his connection therewith at his 
own option without rendering a reason. In this free country every 
man claims that privilege. By a single act, in a single moment, with- 
out seeing any of the church officers, he can sever his connection. 
Now, why has not the whole Church as much right in these premises 
as the individual? If the Church should elect a council in whose 
election every member has a voice, and whenever that council thinks 
that the connection of the member with the church does not pro- 
mote the glory of God the council have a right to dissolve his con- 
nection, there would be more equity and less friction. Without a 
trial the member can dissolve his connection with the church. With- 
out a trial the church should be at liberty to withdraw from connec- 
tion with the member. If one man be permitted to decide, without 
conference, to dissolve his connection with it why should not the 
church have the same privilege and right in respect to the member? 
Membership in a church is not like a seat in Congress. The member 
is not elected there, but covenants with the church for membership. 
It is a partnership which can be dissolved at the will of either party. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 555 

The case of a pastor in the denominational churches is different, 
manifestly, from that of the member. He is sent forth to teach cer- 
tain things which are published in the standards of that Church. 
There seems to be an agreement that he shall adhere to those stand- 
ards. Now, so long as his belief in the doctrines of that Church re- 
main unchanged so long can the preacher conscientiously set forth 
those doctrines. But suppose his devout and careful examination of 
the Holy Scripture should lead him to other views of the truth re- 
vealed in the Holy Scripture. What then? Plainly, if he continue 
to preach the old doctrines he is a hypocrite, and worthless as a 
moral teacher. If he advance his own views of the truth he collides 
with the standards. What is to be done in such a case as that? If 
the Church will not alter its standards the preacher must go out 
therefrom, but in this age of the world it is ridiculous to brand him 
as a heretic. The open question is whether the truth is with him or 
with those whom he left. They should part in brotherly love and he 
should preach the truth as it is in Jesus according to the light vouch- 
safed him. But if he take no steps for a dissolution, without ani- 
mosity some appointed body in the church could say this : " Whereas 
the teachings of the Rev. A. B. do now differ from the standards of 
his church, his connection therewith is hereby dissolved." If there 
be any doubt as to the difference between his teachings and the 
standards the same body might be competent to decide that. 

But suppose the case of morality be involved, and common fame 
connected the minister's name with wrong-doing; that same body 
might be empowered to dissolve his connection with that church 
because his connection therewith in their judgment no longer pro- 
moted the glory of God. No harm would be done the man more 
than would be done the church if he should leave it on a similar 
ground. 

The fact seems to be that the public have ceased to have much 
regard for the decisions of what are called ecclesiastical courts. A 
man of ability will have a congregation even if condemned by every 
ecclesiastical court in the country, and the more they condemn him 
the greater will be his popularity in certain directions. So well is 
this trait of human nature known that it has been suspected that cer- 
tain men have sought ecclesiastical trial as a wider advertisement, 



556 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

which in point of fact it is. In large cities it makes the man known 
all over the country. Moreover — alas! that it is so — even if the man 
acknowledge that of which he is charged, and even gloried in it, he 
would by that means attract very many to him who would otherwise 
pay little attention to his teachings. If a so-called clergyman, the 
pastor of a so-called church, should announce his rejection of the 
Bible, or openly keep six wives and avow the propriety thereof, hun- 
dreds would flock to his standard, and we feel pretty sure that there 
is not a congregation in our largest cities that would not be largely 
increased if the ponies and the clown from the circus took part in 
each public service. The personnel would change, but the numbers 
would increase. 

These are most lamentable facts, but they have some bearing upon 
ecclesiastical trials as showing their comparative uselessness. That 
they are hurtful in many directions is admitted on all hands. Why 
then should they be continued? " For the purity of the Church. " 
it may be answered. But how do these trials secure the purity of 
the Church ? If a man has been bold to rebuke wrong-doing any 
enemy can have an indictment against him, and the best man may 
be excluded because a majority of the church are influenced by prej- 
udice or passion. Moreover, in these public trials the jurors are power- 
fully influenced by the pressure of outside public opinion ; and then, 
ordinarily, the body is so large that each man shifts the responsibility 
of the decision from his own shoulders. If a small body of men were 
selected annually, and the whole care of these questions committed 
to them, with power to dissolve the connection of any minister with 
his Diocese, Presbytery, or Conference, whenever in the opinion of 
that small body, say of seven men, the minister's connection with the 
ministry of that church had ceased to promote the glory of God, 
would not this be better? Would they be as liable to err as a whole 
Diocese, Presbytery, or Conference in convention? If seven men 
were held responsible, and were expected to do all they could to 
save the minister, and not to exclude him until they were satisfied 
that he was unrepentantly sinful, would he not be more likely to 
have justice? 

We would not dogmatize here, certainly we do not dictate, but we 
do venture to suggest that the best intellects in all the Christian 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 557 

Churches should be applied to the devising of some means of avoid- 
ing the scandals which through the ages have come out of church 
trials. On one point we have a positive opinion which we do not 
hesitate to express ; namely, that for any body of men to apply to 
themselves the title of " the Court of Jesus Christ " is an approxi- 
mation to blasphemy. Jesus Christ have a court, and especially a 
church court, when he himself was the victim of such a court ! A 
church court, indeed ! A court of Jesus Christ ! Let us be careful 
how we attach any word to his great and holy name. 



SCHISM. 

The word schism has a frightful sound. Schismatics are regarded 
by religious people with feelings akin to horror. Nor are these sen- 
timents wholly wrong. They have some grounds in truth and jus- 
tice. It does become Christian men to be very careful to ascertain 
what is schism and who are schismatics. 

The word schism occurs only once in the New Testament Script- 
ures, namely, in 1 Cor. xii, 25. Its use there in its connections may 
help us to an understanding of the scriptural meaning and correct 
some opinions which are not scriptural. The apostle had been 
teaching the spiritual oneness of all those who are in Christ Jesus, 
and had been inculcating a visible living together in the unity of the 
Spirit and in the bond of peace. He taught that this was entirely 
practicable, even in view of the manifest facts of the " diversities of 
gifts," " differences of administration," and " diversities of operations." 
One might have one gift, and another another. In their outward 
operations one set of gifts might be more brilliant, and one set of 
graces more conspicuous than another set of gifts and graces, but 
that these were all necessary for the completion of the body of the 
congregation of Jesus Christ. 

He illustrates this from the organism of the human body, the. 
unity of which does not exclude, but rather includes, a plurality of 
members ; and these members are not all equal in function or util- 
ity or comeliness ; but the least comely and the least useful are ab- 
solutely essential to the completeness of the body. 

So it is in the body of Christ. " Now ye are the body of Christ, 



5*8 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



and members severally," he says, addressing all Christian people. 
The stress of the apostle's appeal is not to the lower members of 
the body, but to the loftier. He is not telling the feet that they can- 
not say to the head "I have no need of you," but he is telling the 
head that it cannot say so to the feet. He is not telling the more 
feeble members that the more powerful are absolutely necessary, but 
he is telling the stronger members that those which seem to be more 
feeble are necessary. He is not striving to make the uncomely parts 
content with the comely, but is rather endeavoring to make the lat- 
ter feel their need of the former, because in tempering the body 
together God had given more abundant honor to that part which 
lacked. 

Now, keeping this steadily in view, it will become apparent that 
when he applies it to the body of Christ he means to intimate that 
a portion of God's people may drive from themselves another por- 
tion of God's people. It is the body of Christ of which he is speak- 
ing. It may be Christians driving Christians away. It does not 
necessarily follow that either the drivers or the driven are not of the 
body of Christ, but rather the contrary is supposed in the argument; 
and yet whatever produces schism is an unchristian thing, and it is 
that which is to be avoided. 

In ecclesiastical history and polemics there seems to be a perverse 
kind of view taken of this whole subject. The obloquy has been 
put upon the wrong party. The insult of calling them schismatics 
has been added to the injury inflicted when they are schismatized. 
The lexicons and historians seem to be almost unanimously against 
the apostle. They define a schismatic, "one who separates from an 
established church or religious faith on account of a diversity of 
opinion," whereas, really, if the word had been employed by all 
Christian writers in accordance with the apostle's use of the word 
" schism," it would mean one who had torn off from a church and 
thrown away a weaker party because of a diversity of opinion. 

Let us see who creates schism in a church. Let us say that that 
church consists of five hundred members, and that seventy-five — a 
small minority — agree together as touching some opinion contrary 
to that held by the large majority. Now, there need be no separa- 
tion ; the unity of the Spirit can be preserved in the bond of peace 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 559 

among all these five hundred. But if this minority shall say, "We 
will not remain with the body of people holding these opinions," and 
shall go out from among them because they love their opinion more 
than they love their brethren, then this minority are the schismatics. 
But if the majority shall say, " We will not tolerate in our midst these 
seventy-five men who hold this opinion contrary to ours," and shall 
proceed to drive them out by ecclesiastical enactment or social ban, 
or cutting them off from the charities of the whole company, then 
this majority are the schismatics. 

Does not church history show that, ordinarily, this evil has been 
with the majority? To give most familiar and rather modern in- 
stances — Who^ were the schismatics of the fifteenth century : the 
Roman Catholics or the Protestants? Who were the schismatics in 
the last century: the Church of England or the Wesleyans? Who 
are the schismatics to-day: the Roman Catholics or the Old Cath- 
olics ! Very manifestly, in these three several instances, the former. 
Luther did not desire to leave the Church of Rome. He clung to it 
with a wonderful tenacity, and died with some strain of its theolog- 
ical errors in his writings and some still uneffaced impression of its 
powerful hand upon his mighty character. John Wesley never de- 
sired that his followers should leave the Church of England. He 
died on its bosom as in the arms of his ecclesiastical alma mater. 
But the Church of England drove John Wesley's followers out. 
So great is their attachment to Mother Church that Pere Hy- 
acinth and Bishop Reinkens will hardly allow themselves to be 
excommunicated. 

Now, admitting, which we readily do, that ?n all these cases all the 
parties are Christians, because all belong to the body of Christ, there 
is manifest schism. The only question is as to who made it : the 
minority, who hold to an opinion because it commended itself to 
their logical understanding and to their moral sentiments in such a 
way as that to deny it would be the surrender of all truth and man- 
hood upon their part ; or the majority, who said that whether these 
Christian brethren can believe as they do or not they shall profess 
such belief or be driven into separation ? It seems that there should 
be no difficulty in answering these questions ; and yet, not drivers, 
but those who are driven away, are called schismatics. 



5 6o CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

The Lutherans, the Wesleyans, the Methodist Protestants, the 
Old Catholics are schismatics, forsooth ! Well, is it wrong to be a 
schismatic ? If no, why apply the epithet as a term of reproach? If 
yes, how could these schismatics cure the schism? They believe as 
they do believe, and they cannot honestly profess to believe differ- 
ently. What is to be done in a case of that kind ? To go back and 
beg pardon when one has no consciousness of sin would be itself to 
commit a grievous sin. To pretend to believe what one does not be- 
lieve is really worse than to be blindly in error. 

Now, if schism be an evil it must be curable, and those who are 
driven out cannot possibly, in the nature of things, cure it. The 
healing must come from those who drove them out. If, instead of 
restoring the brethren who have erred from the truth* the orthodox 
brethren violently throw out the mistaken children of the Lord, then 
the orthodox are the real schismatics. They are the men who have 
torn the body of Jesus ; for who that is not totally blind can deny 
that, in almost every instance where a notable schism has taken place 
in the Christian Church, the minority have been men of God, devout 
and laborious, and receiving marks of the approbation of God upon 
their labors ? John Locke has well said, " He that denies not any 
thing that the Holy Scriptures teach in express words, nor makes 
expression upon occasion of any thing that is not manifestly con- 
tained in the sacred text, however he maybe nicknamed by any sect 
of Christians, and declared by some, or all of them, to be utterly void 
of true Christianity, yet in deed and in truth this man cannot either 
be a heretic or a schismatic." 

Let all of those who are in power and authority in any part of the 
Church of God take heed to themselves lest they tear out and throw 
away even the feeblest and most uncomely member of the body of 
Christ. And let all men every-where learn to bear all nicknames 
flung at them for the truth's sake, and care only to do the right 
thing, and to be the right thing, rather than have the right name. 
So that they are of the body of Christ they can endure to be called, 
even in derision, " Christian" at Antioch, or " Methodist" at Oxford. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 561 

BURNING OUT A WASPS' NEST. 

Some time ago, while walking in a neighboring city, we asked 
a colored man in one of the parks the names of the several 
churches in view. Giving us what information was in him he 
said : 

" An* dat church I don't know de name of, but dat is de one dey 
burned down." 

" Who burned it ? " we asked. 

" De sexton," he said. 

" Why, how could it be that a sexton would burn down his own 
church ? " 

" You see, sar, dare was a wasps' nest dare, an' de sexton he tried 
to burn out de wasps." 

"Well, did he burn out the wasps?" we asked. 

"Yes, sar; an' he burned down de church, too." 

We meditated on this story as we walked. Wasps have their uses.; 
but, so far as we are able to discern, not in churches. Their utilities 
are decidedly non-ecclesiastic. But sometimes wasps will come into 
churches. It is very undesirable to have them there. One thing may 
be said of these insects, that the less you trouble them the less harm- 
ful they are. Another thing is quite obvious — that a greater evil may 
be brought to pass by an attempt to be rid of a smaller evil. It was 
bad to have the wasps ; it was worse to be compelled to rebuild the 
church. 

And yet perhaps the apparent disaster was providential, and the 
moral which Christendom may learn may be worth the money spent 
in rebuilding the church. 

Into a church membership wasps may come. If, when they are in 
their nests, the nest can be quietly lifted, and it and its inhabitants 
set in the open field, so much the better; but don't let us destroy a 
church in order to destroy a wasps' nest. Let the evil be borne a 
while. By and by the time will come when the wasps will depart, or 
be in such condition that they can be removed with impunity. But 
whenever any Christian society shall determine to free itself of the 
wasps let it be careful as to its modes of extirpation ; above all, let 
it heed the counsel to avoid burning wasps out. 



562 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

CHURCH NOTICES. 

A short time ago I read the following in one of our religious 
papers : 

" Do not allow your pulpit to be a bulletin for posting all man- 
ner of institutions, entertainments, and performances. Have cour- 
age and conscience about this matter. Give out your legitimate 
notices with emphasis and invitation, and put every thing else into 
the waste-basket. Do not oppress your hearers, divert their atten- 
tion, distract their spirit, by reading a string of notices. Few and 
pertinent, or none at all, let them be. A correspondent of the 
Freeman deals with it thus : 

" ' Are our pulpits to be advertising offices and ourselves adver- 
tising agents ? Would it not suffice to allow bills, of a right char- 
acter, to be put on notice-boards outside or in the porch of our 
chapels ? Can the people remember all the notices as they are an- 
nounced from the pulpit ? Do they care to remember them ? Would 
not some which are sent for announcement be better forgotten than 
remembered ? Is not. the practice a hinderance to our worship and 
service, distracting the attention, leading to forgetfulness of the 
petitions which have just been presented at the " throne of grace," 
and unfitting the mind for the message about to be delivered ? 
Stretch your imagination, Mr. Editor, and conceive of Peter in 
Jerusalem, or Paul at Mars' Hill, asked to give out half a dozen 
notices of excursions, bazars, bands of hope, sermons, lectures. 
Can't you see their countenances ? Methinks I can, and see also 
the said " bills " — on the ground ! I could tell you of one church 
where " bills " are allowed to be posted, but no " giving out 
notices." ' " 

Just such thoughts as the above have frequently occurred to me. 
I have been a sufferer along that line, and have very considerable 
sympathy with every thing said ; and yet, upon reading these 
sentences, which sound so like echoes of my own thoughts, I have 
been led to think over the whole subject again. I have often 
wished that I had some church officer with the judgment necessary 
to sift all notices and the elocution necessary to read each notice 
so as to fit it into its place. But that, you see, is quite an art. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 563 

Some of the notices are to be read in the most perfunctory style ; 
you don't care a grain whether any body hears them or not ; the 
reading them is like answering hundreds of letters, which public 
men must notice because of their relation to some one who has 
written them, while they have no earthly interest in the whole 
matter except just to put themselves in the position of not having 
left the letters unanswered. Then there are other notices to which 
there should be given a little emphasis. There are some to be an- 
nounced in a light and airy way, and on others may be hung a really 
valuable lesson to the people. So I have lately been giving some 
attention to the preparation of my notices, and have taken it as a 
part of the regular services. I prepare the reading of my hymns 
and my Scripture lessons as carefully as I do my sermons ; so I am 
trying to see whether I really cannot make the reading of the 
notices to some of my hearers a " means of grace," as I know it is 
to others a " hope of glory." 

Every Sunday morning I deliver several sermons. I strive to 
make each separate lesson from the Scriptures a sermon, so that if 
any one should fall asleep, or be called out after it, he would have 
got his portion in due season. I strive to make every hymn the 
same. Now and then, to the regular sermon, I have a prelude 
which seizes some current event and squeezes all the milk out of it 
— milk for babes, you know. Now, why can I not take up a whole 
batch of notices, of all kinds and colors, and pack these curds down 
into a cheese ? I am not quite satisfied with my experiments thus 
far, but I am certainly not entirely discourged. The publication of 
this article will possibly bring me thirty-one letters from different 
parts of the United States, asking me how I am succeeding, and 
that will give me a fair excuse for reporting progress. 

Dr. Candlish, of the Free Church of Scotland, was a very nervous 
man, and kept one in a state of agitation as to the final effect of his 
sermon upon the condition of his gown, when the storm of his 
delivery wrapped it like a sheet round the yard-arms, and then 
threatened to tear it to pieces by the plunging of the vessel. This 
gifted Dr. Candlish used to be annoyed by the notices sent to his 
pulpit from all parts of Edinburgh. It was believed that the 
notices coming from Dr. Candlish's mouth, and read to the audience 



564 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

assembled in his church, were capital advertisements; and so they 
were ; and the doctor was nearly as obliging a man as I am. But 
one Sunday morning even his patience gave out. He had his hands 
full of documents which he kept on editing and publishing and 
dropping, one after another, until he came into a state of mental 
confusion in the process, when he threw the whole batch on the 
pulpit before him and said : " I should like to know whether all 
Edinburgh has come to the conclusion that my pulpit is a supple- 
ment to the North British Advertiser ! " 

Now, I can't get a line of advertisement into the Herald, the 
Tribune, or the Times without paying some money, and if I should 
be so irreverent as to want to put a notice of preaching in the Sunday 
edition of those papers I should have to pay still more. How 
would it do for churches that have large congregations to establish 
a tariff of rates? It seems to me that this might be made a source 
of income, and perhaps might, in some cases, obviate the necessity 
of having bazars. For instance, if the Church of the Strangers 
could make three dollars a Sunday out of such advertisements it 
might save the Sunday-school having an annual fair for missions, at 
which they would make one hundred and fifty dollars. Don't you 
see what an economical dodge this would be in the matter of time ? 
It never would do to apply this to increasing the salary of the 
clergyman ; for, if you did, all the secular papers that take in so 
many hundreds of thousands of dollars for Sunday advertisements 
would raise a howl against the clergyman for violating the Sabbath 
by working on Sunday. 

Another topic is suggested by the last sentences of the extract 
given above. In accordance with the request of the writer I have 
stretched my imagination ; I have conceived Peter in Jerusalem 
and Paul at Mars' Hill. Now I don't know, I haven't been able 
exactly to see, how Peter would behave about bazars, but I think 
he would be a master-hand at announcing excursions. But Paul ! 
I tell you, it w r as doing what the writer said, namely, stretching my 
imagination, to think of Paul on Mars' Hill, which partially con- 
verted me from my old views ; for if ever there was a man who had 
a talent for notices which nearly amounted to genius it was Paul 
the apostle. You may search the writings of antiquity, from Paul's 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 565 

time back through the two previous centuries, and forward through 
the next two centuries, and I defy you to find any person, Greek or 
Roman, Pagan or Christian, who has given in his writings so many 
evidences of not only his talent but his taste for giving notices. 
Consider, for samples, the following passages : Romans xv, 24, and 
through the remainder of the chapter, and the whole of the 
sixteenth chapter ; also 1 Corinthians, the whole of the sixteenth 
chapter ; also the conclusions of the Epistles to the Ephesians, 
the Philippians, the Colossians, etc. Paul did not seem to 
think that the giving out of these notices would distract the 
attention. 

But seriously, is this the right thing to do, to be striving to 
conform our methods to apostolic methods, instead of striving to 
have our methods animated by an apostolic spirit ? Doesn't it 
bring ridicule upon serious things ? Might not one turn and say: 
" Imagine the apostle Paul holding forth on Mars' Hill in boots, in 
bifurcated nether integuments vulgarly called 'pants,' in a stand- 
ing collar, a white cravat, and a vest buttoned up to the throat ; 
fancy Peter preaching in Jerusalem dressed like an Episcopal 
bishop, or Paul appearing in Macedonia in the high white choker 
and shad-belly coat of the early Methodist bishops?" 

The fact is, if Peter were alive in America to-day he would prob- 
bly be reorganizing the Salvation Army ; but just fancy him doing it 
in Jerusalem ! If Paul were alive to-day he would be editing a weekly 
or monthly publication, as sure as human nature is human nature. 
In other words, he would seize every opportunity of this time, as 
he seized every opportunity of his own time ; he would do nothing 
to shock society in New York or New Orleans in this day, as he did 
nothing of the kind in Jerusalem or in Athens. He would rejoice 
in the press and in the telegraph, and employ them to spread his 
words around the great mo'dern world, as he did employ all the 
means at his command in the world in which he lived. Let us 
pay less attention to rules and more attention to principles. 



566 CHIPS AXD CHUNKS 

THE SICK PARISHIONER. 

The more faithful a pastor is, and the more fit by his very sensi- 
tiveness to be a good pastor, the more he is pained by the unneces- 
sary complaints of his people. One form of his annoyance is the 
complaint of sick people that the pastor does not visit them. The 
invalid who is a member of a church ought to know that he has no 
friend in the world more ready to come to see him than the pastor. 
He ought to be the parishioner of a pastor of such a character as 
to be the most desirable man for the sick man to see; and yet 
through all the large churches people sicken, and sometimes re- 
cover, and then go sulking through the church six months, until at 
last it is discovered that the ground of their grumbling is that the 
pastor had not visited them when they were sick. It is this sense- 
less demand of omniscience which is so intolerable. 

This naturally brings up the question whether the pastor ought 
to go to see sick people until he is sent for.* What right has a whole 
congregation to suppose that the pastor knows of sickness when no 
human being ever presumed upon the physician's having that 
knowledge ? It would be less unreasonable to make this latter sup- 
position. A physician passing among the families in which he has 
patients might begin to suspect from some bodily appearance that 
sickness would shortly ensue, and might therefore be expected to go 
around in due time to see if the suspected person was really sick. 
Instead of that it is the pastor, a man engaged in quite different 
studies, who is supposed to be able, from looking over his congrega- 
tion on Sunday, to believe that Mr. A. will be sick on Monday, 
Mrs. B. will be ill on Tuesday, Mr. C. will sprain his ankle on 
Wednesday, Mrs. D.'s child will have the measles on Thursday, and 
so on through the week. The physician whose business it is especially 
to look after sick folks never goes till he is sent for, even if he 
knows there is sickness ; but the minister is expected to come with- 
out being sent for, and to be able to tell that there is sickness with- 
out any information. 

Perhaps each church needs three bishops : a pastor bishop, an 
evangelist bishop and a teacher bishop ; one to take care of those 

* See this question discussed in my recent volume entitled The Gospel of Common Sense. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 567 

who are already enrolled in the church, to keep them toned up and 
drilled ; another to go out, leading forth as many as he can, to 
bring in those outside, beating up recruits and training them for the 
service; and a third to preach to those inside and outside the 
church, giving his whole time to that one work. As it is now these 
three functions are expected to be discharged by one man. Who- 
ever that man is, and however large his capabilities of discharging 
duties in these three departments, it is quite certain that he will 
excel in one. A man who devotes himself to personal care of 
hundreds of members of a church will have little time to go out 
among men of the world and endeavor to bring them into the 
Church of God. He who devotes his whole week to this latter 
employment can have little time to prepare for the pulpit ; and he 
who does, or undertakes to do, all three, cannot hope to do any of 
them quite as well. Hence the disappointment. It is as if a man 
undertook to practice medicine and law and edit a daily paper. 
That is just what is often expected of pastors in the large churches 
of our cities. 



THE SICK PASTOR. 



The sympathy for pastors often goes in the wrong direction. 
Those who see them in the pulpit much more than anywhere else, 
and who feel that they themselves would find it a gigantic under- 
taking to prepare and deliver one sermon a month, sympathize with 
what they regard as the pulpit labor. This is a mistake. But for 
the relief of the pulpit the pastor would probably be early driven 
insane by his pastoral cares, anxieties, and perplexities. Preaching 
is a delight; to many of us it is delicious. We long for Sunday 
and the pulpit as for the oasis in our desert week of visiting and 
receiving visits, hearing doleful stories, contriving to relieve the 
wants of sufferers, administering discipline, and suffering the annoy- 
ing interruptions which exasperate the nerves of a pastor. During 
the week we endure all these things for the Master's sake, and on 
Sunday he rewards us by letting us preach. The happiest con- 
ceivable life to the present writer is that of a man who has no care of 
any kind and can preach every day. The evangelist who simply 



568 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

preaches has no demand for sympathy. He has the unmixed 
sweetness of the Christian ministry. It is the pastor to whom 
the evangelist has left an increased load of care who is to be 
pitied. He is a very strong man who does not break down oc- 
casionally. 

Sometimes the pastor is sick ; very sick ; so that he is laid up — 
his pulpit being supplied by his brethren. These seasons may be 
made profitable by both the pastor and the parish. 

The former may consider that, if it please God he shall return to 
his regular work, he will have a fresh enjoyment of the blessed 
privilege of preaching the unsearchable riches of Christ, and that 
he will have the enlargement of Christian experience which can be 
gained only from one's own invalidism. As a painter must occa- 
sionally step back from his canvas to see how his work is sustaining 
the proper proportion of coloring, so a pastor who is sequestrated 
will see his work in a light in which it never appears when he is in 
robust health and in the midst of parochial labor. He will see 
where he made too much of something and too little of some other 
thing. He will try on himself the consolations he has tendered to 
others in their sickness, and make personal test of the efficacy of 
his former clinical methods. He will also have the discipline of 
helplessness, he who has been so strong and helpful to others ; and 
he will have fresh sympathy with men who are stricken down in the 
midst of work to which the presence of the patient seems indis- 
pensable. The sick pastor will learn something about his parish- 
ioners which could never come to him while in hale health and 
active work. Many who seemed cold or careless will show how 
precious to them have been the pastor's ministrations. In many 
ways a pastor can turn the trial of sickness to good account in his 
personal experience and in his official work. 

In this sickness the parishioners have a great interest. It should 
be used for profit by the whole parish. Each officer and private 
member should examine himself to see whether he has always been 
careful so to conduct himself as not to have laid an unnecessary 
feather's weight on the heart of the burdened pastor. Neglect of 
duty upon the part of an officer may have chafed the pastor's heart. 
He did not wish to seem a fault-finder in the eyes of the officers of 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 569 

the church, but he knew that things which should be done were left 
undone and the Master's work was suffering ; and so the pastor, in 
directions where he should not have been called, has expended 
strength which was needed where he was held responsible. The 
absentee may reflect that when the pastor had prepared himself to 
preach the Gospel a vacant pew has given him discouragement while 
preaching, and anxiety for the spiritual condition of the absent 
member may have drawn off just that amount of vital force which, 
if retained, would have averted this sickness. The covetous 
member will reflect upon the dampening of the ardor of the pastor 
by his holding back when the pastor was stimulating the people to 
active benevolence, and he may consider that, as the idolatry of 
Israel had wrung the heart of Moses, so his " covetousness, which 
is idolatry," had wrung his pastor's heart, and, perhaps, contributed 
to produce this sickness. The hearers who have often been moved 
by his preaching, and as often resisted, may reflect that perhaps 
they may hear his voice no more, and the Holy Spirit may use this 
reflection to show them the danger of their persistent hardening of 
their hearts under the preaching of the word. 

So long as the pastor is sick each member of the congregation, 
should work as if the whole burden of responsibility had been laid 
on him by the withdrawal of the leader of the flock. In this way 
all parties will be benefited. Ordinarily the pastor takes too much 
upon himself, often that which should be done by others. His 
parishioners gradually yield up the work to hands " that do it so 
well." But no one man can do every thing. Moreover, when it is 
any man's duty to do any work it is not a favor to him or to any 
body to take it off his hands. He who undertakes to do the work 
of two men usually spoils two men's work. It has been noticed in 
the history of more than one church that the providential laying 
aside of the pastor for a season has quickened all church life. Even 
the very change of pulpit diet has been healthy. A constancy of 
the same spiritual food has been known to produce spiritual dys- 
pepsia as certainly as too frequent and too great a change. 

In these and many other ways God may be watering the seed 
sown by the pastor, or preparing the soil of the field for more suc- 
cessful cultivation in the future. 



570 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

When a pastor has been sick, and recovered, let him resume his 
work as being recommissioned, and let all the people meet him in 
the expectation of a revival of religion in the hearts of the congre- 
gation. When the owner of the vineyard has been pruning, the 
vine should increase in fruitfulness. 



THE CHURCH AND THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL. 

What might be resented, if it came in the form of a criticism by 
an enemy, will probably be received kindly if made at the suggestion 
of a devoted friend. My well-known love of Sunday-school work 
will cause all that I write or say on the subject to be considered as 
uttered for the good of the institution. 

Is there no danger of departing from the probable intention of 
God in raising up the great instrumentality for good which the 
Sunday-school has manifestly been ? It seems to have been designed 
to be a missionary operation. It was not so much to take charge of 
the children of church members or church attendants. It was rather 
for the spiritual benefit of our domestic heathen. 

The Church soon discovered the great utility of this form of in- 
dividual Christian effort, proceeded to organize it and attach it to 
the regular church work. Historically there came to exist two kinds 
of Sunday-schools — church Sunday-schools and mission schools. 
The latter has had a subdivision. There are mission schools organ- 
ized and sustained by churches. There are other mission schools 
organized by individuals. The latter must depend for their support 
upon the confidence which the general Christian public has in the 
ability and integrity of those who are responsible for them. The 
mission schools organized by established churches will be governed 
as each of those churches shall determine. 

In this article it is proposed to say a few things about the regular 
church Sunday-schools. 

In the first place, it should be urged upon parents and pastors that 
no Sunday-school, nor any other school, can release them from their 
several responsibilities. Each parent is responsible to God for the 
up-bringing of his children in the nurture and admonition of the 



FOR E VER Y FIRESIDE. 5 7 1 

Lord. That work he cannot do by proxy. He cannot remit it to 
a Sunday-school, or even to a pastor. He must discharge the 
parental duty incumbent on him. 

He may use the Sunday-school as an auxiliary. In such case he 
is bound to see that the Sunday-school is a help to him in training 
his children for God. He must make himself thoroughly familiar 
with the modes and processes of the school which his child attends. 
He must know the teacher personally, and assure himself that that 
teacher is an intelligent and devout Christian. He must know that 
nothing said or done in the school has any tendency to weaken the 
respect of the child for its parents or pastor. He must see that the 
Sunday-school does not draw his child from the regular church serv- 
ice. If the child has not the physical endurance to attend both he 
must quit the Sunday-school for the Church, and not the Church for 
the school. The Sunday-school can never take the place of the 
Church. Preaching is the divinely ordained instrumentality for the 
conversion of the world. 

This being true, the pastor's duty is very plain. He must make 
the church attractive to the children. A shepherd's first duty is to 
the lambs of the flock. A majority of the whole church member- 
ship now on earth became religious in childhood. It is the largest 
and most promising field for ministerial exertion. The pastor should 
be concerned if the children of his congregation become adults be- 
fore they become members of the church. 

Setting himself to the salvation of each one of them, his Sunday- 
school should exist for the sole purpose of helping him therein. If 
it have any other aim it will not only be useless, but also an in- 
cumbrance and a hinderance. The superintendent is the chief sub- 
pastor, under whom all the teachers are made sub-pastors. No one 
should hold any position of government or instruction in any church 
Sunday-school who is not devoted to the work of saving souls and 
heartily in sympathy with the pastor of that particular church for his 
work's sake. 

I very much approve a suggestion lately made that each person 
appointed a teacher in a church Sunday-school should be publicly 
inducted into office with some solemnity, such as makes a deacon 
or deaconess feel the responsibility of the undertaking. Parents, 



572 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

pastors, and superintendents should be united in vigilant efforts to 
keep the Sunday-school in its proper place as an auxiliary, and not 
an independent instrumentality. This would save much waste of 
effort and produce the best possible results. 



OUR PLAN OF PASTORAL WORK. 

The pastor must know his flock. He must see his people, that 
he may know how to preach, and that he may instruct and comfort 
each soul. How is he to do this in a large congregation in a great 
city? The very qualities which have gathered his congregation 
must have drawn attention to him so as to multiply the demands 
the public will make upon the pastor — demands which he cannot 
ignore without diminishing his influence as a pastor. 

For some time I have followed a plan which has been of great 
service in my pastoral work. It may not suit others, but Elizabeth 
Stuart Phelps, who heard of it several years ago, made a pastor in 
her Story of Avis adopt it. Several clergymen have lately been 
witnesses to its working, and at their solicitation this statement is 
prepared. 

On the roll of communicants of the Church of the Strangers are 
over six hundred names, and that list is kept so carefully purged that 
we believe five hundred and ninety persons are known. They must 
be seen. They live in a circle whose radius is about six miles. 
There are strangers who are temporarily in the city who have special 
claims on this pastor. There are outsiders who must be visited. 
Frequently there are several sick at the same time, and miles apart. 
Then there are the innumerable interruptions which consume time. 
There is church business to be dispatched. There are church char- 
ities to be dispensed. How is this all to be done ? This is our 
plan : 

To each member there is given at the first of the year a card, 
with his name and church number on it, ruled so that he can keep 
record of the communion Sundays, and spaces left for answers to 
the questions : " Have you visited your pastor this year ? " " Has 
your pastor visited you this year?" These cards are collected 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 573 

between the December communion and Christmas. (Communion 
every month, first Sunday.) When collected a list is made of all 
those whom the pastor has not visited, and he endeavors to visit 
them during the year. To those who have not visited the pastor a 
written invitation is sent during the year, specifying the time the 
parishioner should call. If practicable the pastor has a reception 
every week at his own house, from 3 to 6 and from 7:30 to 9 P. M.., 
and he announces the day from the pulpit on the preceding Sunday. 
He does not have a fixed day, because there are persons who have 
engagements on certain evenings the year round. By varying the 
day all have an opportunity. Moreover, if he had an invariable day 
it would preclude other things, such as marriages, funerals, preach- 
ing elsewhere, which might arise during the week. All who wish 
to see the pastor are without excuse if they complain that they 
have not had pastoral attention. 

On the visiting day the callers are shown into the front parlor, and 
there they may read or converse until each person's turn comes. 
They are seen in the rear parlor, each alone, or friends together, or 
members of the same family together, as they may choose, but each 
in the order of his coming. 

Will they come ? My memoranda shows that September 3 there 
were 16 visitors, and prayer was had with 12 ; September 11, visitors 
20, prayer with 13. One week it was Monday, the next Tuesday. 
It will be seen from this average that if two thirds were church 
members and 40 receptions were held in a year 480 members would 
have visited the pastor. In looking over the memoranda mentioned 
above I find that in six hours, time having been taken for dinner, I 
had done pastoral work which would have required three whole days 
with a carriage to have accomplished. And it was done more satis- 
factorily. My pastoral work calls me to the poorest and the richest 
in New York, as the work of pastors in smaller places calls them to 
the extremes of society. I think I may say that in one lialf the 
cases I feel that the time selected for the visit was unfortunate. The 
men are not seen by day— they are at their business ; the women have 
their household work or social engagements. Some have visitors. 
Some are in boarding-houses. Some are so situated that there is 
no opportunity for prayer. All these difficulties are avoided by a 



574 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

visit to the pastor. It is known that he will be at home, that it will 
be no intrusion norinterruption, that in as much privacy as in his 
own home the parishioner may have interview, counsel, and the help 
of prayer. My people like it better and better. 

This plan gives the pastor more time to visit the sick, to follow 
up those who ought to have a pastor's care, but will not seek it. It 
does not take the place of the pastor's visiting his flock. From the 
interviews at his house he often learns the need of going somewhere 
he never would have thought of. It does not do away with work, 
but it doubles pastoral usefulness. The reports in our church at the 
last annual meeting show that the pastor had made 426 calls and 
paid 629 visits during the year 1882. 

This is the best plan for me. It is not urged upon any other 
pastor. He must determine whether it is worth trying in his field. 



A "RETREAT." 



[Remarks at Prayer-Meeting, Church of the Strangers, Friday Evening, Sep- 
tember 17, 1886, by Rev. Dr. Deems. Reported by M. L. W.] 

You know, my beloved brethren, that I am accustomed to take 
my church into my confidences. I never go anywhere without wish- 
ing you were all there. I never enjoy any spiritual blessing without 
wishing that you all shared it. 

During the past week I have had a new experience ; I have en- 
joyed a new pleasure ; I have discharged a new function, and I do 
not know but that I have developed a new talent ; and it was in this 
wise: Some time ago I was invited by a number of New England 
ministers to take charge of a " Retreat." Now, I had never seen a 
" Retreat " of Christian ministers. I did not know what kind of a 
thing it was to be, and when I wrote for information they could not 
tell me. I scarcely knew what they wished of me, and when I came 
to be among them they could not tell why they had invited me. I 
simply learned in advance that these men of God desired to turn 
away from the regular discharge of their parish duties and spend a 
few days apart in solitude, conversing, praying, confiding one to all, 
as a man unto his brothers, the things which lay most upon his 
heart, and that one of the members had been strongly moved to 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 575 

feel that I was the man to lead them, and the others consented 
thereunto. 

There were only these things stipulated by me in advance : that 
there should be no controversies ; that there should be no theolog- 
ical speculations ; that there should be no cant ; that there should 
be no " smartness," and that whatever was said or done should be 
done and said to increase in us a sense of the supernataralness of 
the work in which we were engaged and animate the spirit with 
which we were preaching. These were the only stipulations except 
that, when they sent to me for a programme for a few papers, I gave 
them a list of subjects, with the distinct understanding that nothing 
should be prepared for brilliancy or effect, but simply for the deep- 
ening of our love for the Christian ministry. 

Well, when the time came I went, having made no preparation, 
looking up no texts, making no speech. Last Tuesday morning at 
ten o'clock we met in one of the largest churches in Springfield, 
Mass. There were over thirty clergymen present, all of whom were 
present at all the succeeding sessions — the largest number, I think, 
being forty. 

I gave myself very much to the leading of the Holy Spirit, telling 
the brethren that I did not feel that I could lead Christian ministers, 
and that some of them had had as much of ministerial life as I had, 
but that I was willing to be there simply because some one had to 
be in the lead, and that w r e would now give ourselves up to prayer. 

Well, that morning session was two hours long. The first paper 
was by the Rev. H. Matthews, of Springfield, an Englishman, but 
for some time in New England, preaching. The theme was, " The 
Holy Spirit for service ; and conditions on which his presence and 
help are assured." That was discussed, and then in the afternoon 
of the day a paper was read by the Rev. G. C. Osgood on " The 
need of the hour, or our responsibility as ministers of the Gospel, 
in view of the present state of the Church and society." Then, at 
7:30, we had, " The relation of ministerial character to ministerial 
success," by the Rev. J. M. Leonard, of Westfield. Each of these 
papers had to be given in not more than half an hour, and some of 
them did not quite take up that time. We would pray whenever 
we felt moved ; we sung, and the remainder of the two hours was 



5;6 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

devoted to work. Remarks were made and questions were asked 
me. I made brief addresses, and then questions were propounded 
to me as to what my experience had been, not holding strictly to 
the subject on the programme. That was a full' day's work of six 
hours. As we prayed the room seemed to be filled with the Holy 
Spirit; there were some moments of very awful tenderness. 

On the next morning we resumed. We had three papers that 
day, one by the Rev. W. G. Richardson, of Warren, Mass., on 
"What doctrines and methods should be employed and especially 
emphasized in the preaching and pastoral work of to-day?" an- 
other, in the afternoon, on " How far should we depend on the pul- 
pit for general appeal, and how far employ personal labor with the 
unsaved ? " by the Rev. George W. Mansfield, of Wilbraham. Then, 
in the evening, the services were closed with a sermon by your pas- 
tor, at 7:30, to what was reported to have been one of the very largest 
gatherings ever assembled on a week-day night in a church in the 
city of Springfield. 

There are a few things which may be said about this. In looking 
over that assembly of ministers one was struck, in the first place, by 
the exceeding great diversity of gifts. One of the smallest men I 
ever saw in " the ministerial capacity " I saw there ; one of the larg- 
est I ever saw in " the ministerial capacity " I saw there. We had 
an Englishman, an Irishman, and a colored pastor, and men who, 
having been born out of New England, had for a number of years 
been laboring in New England. Some of the men were of poetic 
temperament, some had had a very strict logical training ; some of 
the men had had many advantages of education, while, plainly, the 
advantages of some of the others were very limited. Some of these 
pastors had rich parishioners who lived in houses of such beauty 
that one was struck at the sight of them. Others of them were 
laboring in probably the hardest parishes in America, as I am told 
that some of the hill parishes in western Massachusetts are among 
the most difficult. I do know that one brother, whose two prayers 
fairly seemed to shake the house, had borrowed money to come to 
the meeting, feeling a great desire to be there, and that he actually 
did not have the nickels to pay his way on the road to his distant 
lodgings in the city of Springfield. I tell you what I did discover : 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 577 

that there was not a man in that assembly who did not feel that 
this work of the Christian ministry was the most precious work, 
such work as might fill an angel's hand and such as filled the Sav- 
iour's heart. 

I have never seen men who were strangers so unbosom themselves 
to one another, for they freely confided, each to all, as to loving 
brothers, their perplexities and trials — their confidences to be held 
sacred outside. I wished — as I said to the citizens of Springfield — 
that all the laymen of New England could, somehow, have looked 
in upon us, the pastors not knowing their people were looking upon 
them. I felt that if my own people could have seen my heart dur- 
ing those moments of retreat it would have been as much a means 
of grace to them as that Retreat was to their pastor. 

The laymen in the Church do not know how much pastors need 
pastors. I have never seen you receive your pastor with more cor- 
diality and interest and look of expectation than those forty men 
received me — as if I had been a messenger from God. It was a new 
revelation to me, of which they themselves were doubtless uncon- 
scious, but of which, by my position, I was compelled to be conscious. 
I had come suddenly into a new parish in which each parishioner 
was a pastor and every pastor longed for pastoral help ; all were 
looking up to me, leaning upon me, hanging upon my words, and 
questioning me, asking how this was to be done and that was to be 
overcome. In it all I was filled with such a spirit of humility as I 
never have felt in all the previous years of my ministry — not only 
as regarded these men, but in relation to the supernaturalness of the 
work of the ministry in which we were all engaged. 

It is an important thing to think of. There is a man in a parish up 
in Massachusetts who has been toiling and suffering and bearing his 
cross, and when things do not go right he says : " O my God, is it 
because I don't know how to manage this parish ? Is it because I 
have been failing in some duty?" To whom can he cry it out? — 
to his parish ? He must not take his troubles to his parish. One 
of the most painful things in a pastor's life is that when he has his 
private sorrow and agony he must not tell it to his people, for he 
has been set to bear their burdens and not to burden them. And 
when he does tell them his sorrows he has the sense of humiliation 



573 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

that a shepherd would have if instead of carrying his sheep he 
should lay his wallet on the sheep's back to be carried home. There- 
fore ministers keep their sorrows to themselves. 

Then another thing struck me : there is something needed by a 
pastor besides the loving intercourse with parishioners, which is past 
all value to him, and something beyond general intercourse with 
brother ministers, which is sometimes helpful to him, and something 
not realized in ministerial clubs where questions of theology are 
discussed, and where in the arena of such discussions ministers 
strengthen their muscles for the battles they must fight in their 
parishes. Another thing is needed : the coming together of minis- 
ters simply to pray and to open their hearts one to another in the 
sweetness of perfectly familiar intercourse near the throne of God. 

When they closed I said to them, " My brethren, I have been 
connected with a number of different kinds of bodies of men, social, 
political, scientific, and ecclesiastical, and I have never been with 
any company of gentlemen in sessions that covered twelve hours in 
which there had not come out some little exhibition of vanity, or 
pride, or jealousy, or morbid sensitiveness, even in ministers of the 
Gospel ; but I can say before God that if there has been the slight- 
est exhibition of any one of these things here I have failed to dis- 
cover it, and I have not been so wide-awake in many a year as I 
have been here." 

Well, this is the function I discharged there, and when it closed 
the brethren were so sweet and good ; and I know they told me the 
truth as to my work there. It was not flattery — we did not have 
any of that there ; there was not an empty compliment paid by any 
man to any man in all Springfield during our session so far as I 
know, and that was a comfort ; but there was a conviction of hav- 
ing been greatly helped, for which God was profoundly thanked. 

It was no false modesty that made me ask myself the morning I 
left New York, "Why am I going? How can I do this? I never 
tried it before ; have I any talent for it ? " And it was no boastful- 
ness that led me to say when I went to bed the last night, " Behold, 
I have a talent committed to my care, and the Lord has never given 
me the opportunity before to make use thereof. I have been able 
to so conduct this meeting — by God's grace and through the prayers 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 579 

of these men — that it hath not been a failure." And when we 
parted — in tears and with hand-grasps and benedictions — parted to 
meet, probably, no more until we come into the Father's house 
where the many mansions are — we all seemed to feel that it had been 
a providence of God, for no one could detect any special human 
agency in the inception of the thing. 

I feel that this meeting has abundantly blessed and strengthened 
me, and I am profoundly grateful to the New England ministers 
who, in a time when I was crowded with work and wanted to begin 
the labors of the fall, and when my heart was burdened with sorrow, 
drew me away to enjoy those two days when we sat hard by the 
throne of God and close down at the feet of Jesus. 



MINISTERS BREAKING DOWN IN HEALTH. 

An interview obtained expressly for The Homiletic Review, and published 
therein October, 1889. 

The conspicuousness of ministers of the Gospel is the cause of 
all this talk about ministers breaking down. No more ministers 
" break down," or break down sooner, than bankers, merchants, law- 
yers, politicians, and physicians. Indeed, it seems to me that those 
who break down quickest and worst are physicians. And, when I 
come to think of it, it is natural that this should be the case, because 
of the strain on them and their irregular hours. 

I do not know that my being sent to the country last September 
really marked a. breaking down with me. It has been told over and 
oft about me that when I first came to New York after the war, 
when I was forty-five years old, I worked at the Church of the 
Strangers for eight years and five months with but one Sunday vaca- 
tion. It has also been told that since I returned from the East, on 
the first Sunday of July, 1880, I have had but two Sundays vaca- 
tion, and they occurred in the midst of travel, when I failed, to make 
connection. It has been repeatedly told to the press that I have 
preached forty-nine years and lost only eight Sundays through per- 
sonal sickness, and four of those Sundays were caused by a sprained 
ankle. 

Other ministers, it has been pointed out, have had their summer 



5 8o CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

vacations, going to Europe, going to Saratoga, going elsewhere, but 
it has not been told so frequently that I have pretty strictly observed 
the Sabbath law during the last score of years, namely, of sequester- 
ing one day, Saturday, in each week from all kinds of professional 
business, making it a day on which, on no account, would I read a 
sermon, a treatise on theology, or any thing that has to do with my 
profession — a day in which I sleep, bathe, doze, browse, and do noth- 
ing, in the most promiscuous manner. 

Some pastors may believe in touching up their sermon on Satur- 
day in order to be ready for the next day's service. When I go to 
bed on Saturday night I do not know what I am to preach about 
the next day ; I have clean forgotten. But on this Thursday after- 
noon on which I am being interviewed both my sermons are in a 
drawer of my desk as ready as I can make them for my use next 
Sunday morning. 

When I come in on Saturday evening my wife reads to me till bed- 
time, and, ordinarily, the reading of that evening consists of stories. 
Among men I prefer Walter Scott as a pure and unadulterated 
story-teller. Among women, on the other side, George Eliot, and 
upon this side, Amelia Barr. While I was in the Sanitarium my 
wife read to me eight volumes of Mrs. Barr's novels. They charmed 
and helped me, and, as I have said, left such a sweet taste in my 
mouth that I have been commending them to others. 

The physicians conspired and sent me out of town just because I 
fainted one Sunday morning in church. If they had allowed me to 
wash my face and pray a minute in my study I should have gone 
back. From that first Sunday in September until last week I took 
but two doses of medicine, my treatment at the Sanitarium being 
diet and quiet, and during the four months I was there I copyrighted 
four books. 

I believe I should have broken down but for several facts. One 
is my observance of the Sabbath law as above stated. Another, 
my resolution, formed years ago, never to give up the ghost, so that 
if I ever reach heaven Death will have to pull the ghost away from 
me ; I will never give up the ghost. Another is that I do not often 
allow my work to wear on me. I work very steadily and very sys- 
tematically. Another is that I have great talent for sleeping. I can 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 58 1 

sleep on the cars, sleep amid crowds, as I have when five thousand 
men were marched within fifty feet of where I lay sleeping with- 
out waking me till the time to preach had arrived ; as I can in church, 
having actually slept while the congregation were singing the hymn 
immediately before my sermon, on their ceasing to sing the silence, 
of course, waking me up. " He giveth his beloved sleep." Another 
is my keen appreciation of the fun there is in the world. I could 
not endure the tragedies I am compelled to witness as a Christian 
minister if I did not, on all proper occasions, step aside to witness 
the comedies -of life. 

Really and sincerely, I believe that my health is maintained very 
largely by the faith I have in prayer and the assurance I have 
that every day and every night many of my congregation are mak- 
ing prayer that my health and life may be spared. 

I believe that the minister is bound to take care of his health. 
When I was a boy I adored brains. Now, the first question I want 
to know about any man is as to his stomach. In preaching, health 
is to thought what in rifle-shooting powder is to the ball. I have 
taken gymnastic exercises under a teacher, believing that it is not 
safe for an unprofessional man to guide himself to any great ex- 
tent in that matter. 

"An impression sometimes prevails among people," says Dr. 
Storrs, in his lectures to theological students, " that religion is good for 
dyspeptics and invalids, for nervous people and for women ; but that 
it does not suit well with a body full of spirit and health. People 
are apt to expect to find in a minister a debilitated student who does 
not know much of what real and vigorous manhood means. His 
words are for persons like himself, and not for hale men in an out- 
door life. A full development of vital force, a robust and athletic 
habit of body, if he can gain it, is the best answer to such an idea. 
Therefore, if for this reason only, it is a Christian duty to gain it 
and to keep our merely physical force at the highest point." 

I find a good deal of exercise in pastoral visiting. I have walked 
several miles to-day in paying visits to four sick parishioners. When 
my time allows I walk instead of ride, and amuse myself with the 
shop-windows. I regard it a healthy thing to stroll through the 
streets of New York and look at the shop-windows, in addition 
37 



582 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

to the fact that it goes far toward giving a man a liberal 
education. 

I think the mistakes of young preachers lie largely in their zeal 
outrunning their knowledge in the desire to take the world by storm ; 
in the irregularity of their habits, some of them priding themselves 
upon not finishing their sermons until one o'clock Sunday morning ; 
their failure to observe the Sabbath law, and invasions made upon 
their health by irregularities in their diet. Old pastors know how to 
eat small meals at big dinners, but it requires years to attain skill 
in that department, and in those years many a man destroys his 
stomach. 



"ENDURING HARDNESS" AS A "SOLDIER." 

The injunction of Paul, an elder minister of the Gospel, to Tim- 
othy, a younger minister, is, " endure hardness as a good soldier of 
Jesus Christ." 

Every Christian is employed in a warfare against evil, and his pas- 
tor is his captain. The whole conduct of each must be that which 
becomes a man so engaged. Keeping the end in view we shall be 
able in some measure to learn how that precept is to be observed. 
It must not be misinterpreted into any thing which justifies a Chris^ 
tian man in being a milk-and-water character. It is not consistent 
with Christian charity or Christian courage to endure every thing. 
It is a hurtful misinterpretation of both the letter and the spirit of 
the Gospel which leads any professed Christian to succumb to an 
invasion of his rights or the degradation of his manhood. 

If the apostle had left his precept in the simple form, " endure 
hardness," and had not added, " good soldier of Jesus Christ," he 
might have been misapprehended. When a Christian man comes 
now, however, to consider his duty in respect to any " hardness " 
which may befall him, he is at the same moment to consider his 
position "as a soldier of Jesus Christ." He is a militant person, a 
fighter by profession, and he must so " endure the hardness " of life 
as to bring no suspicion upon his military valor. 

If this be kept in view Christian men can shape their lives so as 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 583 

to give no encouragement to self-indulgence so far as they are con- 
cerned, nor to presumption so far as others are concerned. . It is 
" hardness " we are to " endure," not the infliction of it. It is the 
u hardness " which is inseparable from the soldier's life. It is not 
the silent enduring of such wrongs as should be rebuked and of 
such tyrannies as should be resisted. 

When a Christian man stands up for his rights there are evil men 
enough to cry out, " See how he lacks charity." And there are 
weak-minded Christians enough to be offended at him because he 
behaves in a manly way. When stripes were laid on the bare back 
of Paul in the market-place he endured the hardness as a soldier 
of Christ. But when, after this beating, being a Roman citizen and 
cast into prison, the local authorities discovered their mistake and 
desired him to go out quietly, he positively refused. The " hard- 
ness " he " endured as a good soldier." But he would not let the 
Philippian magistrates be permitted to pass as if they had done no 
wrong when they had outraged him. He was determined that they 
should stand before the people with the shame that always rested 
upon an officer of the Roman Government who had struck a Roman 
citizen. 

We shame our Master by any mean-spiritedness just as we shame 
him by any refusal to suffer for his sake. " As good soldiers of 
Christ " our Examplar is our leader. What Jesus bore we in our 
measure must bear, and bear it as he bore it. What Jesus resisted 
we must resist in our measure as far as we can, and we must resist 
as he resisted. 

The two great elements in the military character are fortitude and 
courage — fortitude to bear all the " hardness " inseparable from camp 
life, and courage to dare whatever our duty to our cause may demand. 
We think many an uninstructed conscience which is now lacerated 
might be healed if such views as these were presented. To preserve 
his rights a Christian citizen is bound to use every means in his 
power the employment of which does not invade the rights of others. 
He must, as far as practicable, prevent the infliction of hardness, 
so that all his strength may be preserved for the " endurance " of 
hardness. 



584 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

INDEPENDENT THINKING. 

How little independent thinking there is! and how little real taste 
do we generally find in that society which is ordinarily considered 
cultivated! 

There is a kind of fashion in books, as in bonnets. A person of 
information and taste has admiration for something — say a picture ; 
he has solid ground for his opinion of the merits of the picture, and 
his pleasure in it is a pleasure created by a cultivated taste. The 
fact that he is good authority makes thousands praise the pict- 
ure which he praises, although those thousands may have no appre- 
ciation of the merits of the picture; and so from mouth to mouth 
the verdict goes, and enters books, and is transmitted down genera- 
tions of authors, and so it comes to be the orthodox thing to admire 
a picture whether one really takes pleasure in it or not. 

As an illustration of this regard we might cite the admiration in 
which Raphael's "Madonna," at Dresden, has held everybody's express 
admiration, so that millions have obtained pictures of it. In how 
many houses we see photographs of the wild, scared-looking Holy 
Child, in the arms of its staring mother, with the two naked, fat- 
winged little imps in front, who look exactly as if they had been 
doing something for which their mothers would spank them — if cher- 
ubs had mothers, and any spanking-place on their persons. Now, 
of the thousands who sit before that picture with dropped under- 
jaws and rapt expression of countenance, how many know why they 
admire it, beyond the fact that every one does ? Would not a large 
majority of those starers, if they told the truth, say that they had 
seen a hundred pictures in Europe which really gave them more 
pleasure than Raphael's " Madonna" ? 

One night in Rome we were sitting in our hotel writing our hon- 
est opinion of Michael Angelo's great picture in the Sistine Chapel. 
It was as preposterous in a man who was not an artist to express an 
opinion upon such a work as it is for a layman to have an opinion 
in theology! Just as we were completing our notes a very distin- 
guished sculptor came in, and we ventured to tell him how we were 
employed. As we had no reputation to lose in that line we frankly 
read him our notes. He burst into laughter, and said: "Well, that 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 585 

is the opinion, probably, of nine tenths of all artists in regard to 
these points, but there is not one of us who would have the moral 
courage to publish it." 

Then, again, there is Mr. Turner's " Slave-Ship. " Mr. Ruskin 
wrote a most elegant description of it. His father owned it. We 
are told that Mr. John Taylor Johnson, of New York, paid ten 
thousand dollars for it. The gallery-walkers were enraptured over 
it. Even people of cultivated tastes gave glowing descriptions of 
it. None now, probably, would dare express his real opinion of 
this outrageous daub. Skies such as God never made, seas such 
as winds never plowed, floating iron such as never came from mine, 
make up this hideous mass of pigment. It is not beautiful. There 
is no sense in it. No possible human sagacity could be expected 
to discover what the painting was intended to represent. The fact 
now comes out that it was painted at a time when Mr. Turner was 
crazy. It is a daub ; but not every painter could paint such a daub. 
It required the hand of Turner; it required that he should be in a 
fit of insanity to produce this horrid abortion. Yet Mr. Ruskin 
praised it in an elegant passage, and none of us dare gainsay it. If 
honest statements of opinions are expressed then a few who assume 
to themselves a monopoly of taste look patronizingly upon honest 
people and explain their difference by taking the ground that these 
honest people have not been educated up to it. 

Nevertheless, it is a good and healthy thing for the intellect and 
for the soul that men form their opinions upon careful study and 
be ready to express them frankly. • It was the blind following of 
Mr. Ruskin which made the " Slave-Ship " draw more than fifty 
dollars out of any body's pocket. In no sense is it worth the price 
except as an autograph of a man is priced high because his hand 
produced it, although there is no check above. In such case the 
money is paid out in the indulgence of a sentiment rather than in 
procuring any thing that is its equivalent. 

But Christian pastors should do much independent thinking. When 
that leads them to an opinion which differs from that which is ordi- 
narily held they should be very careful to re-examine their grounds 
before advancing. On the great doctrines concerning human sal- 
vation there should be very long, careful, and conscientious study 



586 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

before an opinion be expressed. When independent thinking leads 
to new opinions on every trivial subject perhaps the best way is to 
attempt to educate our hearers up slowly to our opinions. 



GREATER WORKS. 



Our great Master said (John xiv, 12), " He that believeth on me, 
the works that I do shall he do also : and greater works than these 
shall he do. because I go unto my Father." In advance we should 
expect a religion of divine origin to be adapted to the develop- 
ment of the highest capability of our nature. Now, we know that 
the power to believe in truth and to act upon it, confident of its 
validity, whatever may be the appearances to the contrary, is 
the highest capability of our intellectual and moral constitution. 
True greatness resides in the development of our highest capability ; 
and, if that be to climb up on another, it is no degradation so to 
climb. The best the "morning-glory" can do is to grow up on 
trellises ; it is no shame for this plant thus to grow. The oak can 
grow without trellis, but the oak must have soil ; it is no shame that 
it grows rooted in the soil. Men look at the outside, God at the 
inside. Actions arouse the enthusiastic applause of men, but it is 
the spirit which performs the action that is admired by God. It 
is faith in the divine administration of the universe which lies 
back of all great discoveries and achievements ; faith being the 
prompter, sustainer, soul of action, and being as much superior to 
action as spirit is to body. This could be illustrated in ten thou- 
sand cases. Take that of Columbus. How we magnify his discovery 
of America! But that was almost nothing. America lay in his path. 
He could not help the discovery if the planet were a globe and he 
sailed westward! The real greatness was in himself; in his faith in 
certain truths ; faith that led him to besiege courts, endure priva- 
tions, face ridicule and scorn. There was the greatness. Columbus's 
faith was a thing greater than all visible continents. 

True religion always develops faith and lets that form the practice. 
A morality constructed on rules is powerless. A man that does 
right because he believes he ought to do right may be trusted ; but 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 



587 



a man who does not steal because it is a fracture of a rule is perpet- 
ually liable to become a thief. The story of paradise, as given in 
the Bible, shows that the state of our first parents was a condition 
for the development of their faith. What was the forbidding of one 
fruit, and only one, but a test of man's faith in his heavenly Father's 
wisdom and goodness? Then came the Deluge. Study that inter- 
val between the command to Noah to build the ark and the down- 
pouring of the flood. Was it not a hundred and twenty years of 
the discipline of faith ? Take the history of the Exodus— that pro- 
longed journey from Egypt to the promised land. Can you under- 
stand this without regarding it as a trial of faith, a development of 
faith, in the Israelites ? Was not the whole space of time from 
the settlement of Israel in Palestine to the death of our Lord a dis- 
cipline of faith ? And has not the same thing been going on ever 
since? 

Enough is revealed to us now to be the basis of faith, but no such 
revelation need ever be expected as shall supplant faith by knowl- 
edge ; such a thing would be a disaster. Jesus Christ came to pre- 
sent a permanent object of faith and a perpetual source of spiritual 
power. He was " God manifest in the flesh," and he says, " Ye believe 
in God, believe also in me." That his teachings should have a con- 
trolling influence over men it was necessary that they should believe 
in his divinity. Both by works and words he partially created this 
conviction ; and, what is almost constantly overlooked, there is no 
greater proof of the divinity of our Lord than is shown by the very 
transfer of the same kind of moral power to all who really lead lives 
of faith in him. " The works that I do shall ye do." What works 
did Jesus do to which he had reference? Certainly he did not 
include the work of atoning sacrifice, which could be made by none 
who was not at once God and man. Of what was the Master talk- 
ing? Of his oneness with the eternal Father; of his divinity, his 
essential deity. Now, whatever in any age is needed to set this 
forth to the world sufficiently to convince unprejudiced, willing, and 
intelligent minds shall from age to age be granted to those who 
believe in Jesus. No amount or quality of evidence can convince 
the unwilling. 

Jesus wrought miracles. So did his disciples. In the Acts of the 



588 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



Apostles we learn that the shadow of Peter healed the diseases, 
that devils were cast out by aprons taken from St. Paul, and that 
Elymas was struck blind. But miracles are instructive to the 
human intellect only in its childhood. They are the products of 
any intellect that knows how to employ the laws not generally 
known. All who believe in Jesus shall at any time be able to 
perform miracles when miracles are necessary. But they are never 
needed by a religion which has once grown large and strong enough 
to stand alone, and certainly the Christian religion does not need 
miracles. Miracles are on the plane of the material and perishable. 
Miracles are temporary, and must be few. 

The building up of a high, strong, holy character out of one that 
is depraved and low is a greater work than raising Lazarus. 

The elimination and preparation of a truth is greater than is a 
miracle which only changes water to wine or multiplies loaves. 

Men who lead holy lives do, by so living, carry greater conviction 
to the hearts of the world than if they wrought miracles, in the 
vulgar sense of that word. Under the preaching of probably each 
one of the apostles more people were converted than under the 
ministry of Christ, and more under the influence of humble Chris- 
tians in our day than under any of the apostles. " Such honor have 
all his saints." Have you this honor, O brother pastor? Have I ? 




OFFICE LIFE 



LIFE 




f© vi. S) 

— ■ w — xv ^v — ** — 



THE OFFICE 



.«J»«-^-«( 



--£=-»<>" 





■ji&i 




THE OFFICE. 



BUSINESS AN EDUCATOR. 

[An Address delivered in many places.] 

Perhaps we shall all agree that a brief and comprehensive defini- 
tion of education is a full and harmonious training of all the men- 
tal and moral powers. 

It is so manifestly every man's duty and interest to place himself 
under all available influences to secure this training that we need 
waste no time in discussing that topic. We need only pause to re- 
mind ourselves that this training must be harmonious, in the sense 
that the moral department of our nature stands as much in need of 
culture as our intellect. The temper of this age is to lay undue 
stress on the education of the mind ; as if a man needed only a 
strong intellect to make him a strong man. The apparent reason of 
this is in the fact that this is a material age, an age greatly engrossed 
in the accumulation of material wealth. For this the sharp intellect 
is important. And if a man's supreme dignity and most consum- 
mate bliss did lie in what he has, rather than what he is, it would be 
almost impossible to overestimate mere schooling of the brain. But 
the testimony of the world's history, the history of nations and of 
individuals, is, that no man is truly noble and wise whose heart does 
not grow good as his head grows great. 

In securing the development of each man, and thus the elevation 
of the whole race, it is quite possible, as in other things, to lose sight 
of the end in the means, and thus make the means take the place of 
the end. Hence, when we come to distinguish between classes of 



592 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

men, and speak of the " educated " class and the "uneducated" 
class, many of us fall into the error of supposing that they, and they 
only, are " educated " who have had a certain kind of training, and 
to regard all as M z/#educated " who have failed to enjoy that specific 
mode of training. Thus it has come to pass that school learning and 
business training are set over against each other, as most diverse, if 
not antagonistic. " Scholars" is a high name which we assign to 
those whose culture has been made in one set of schools — the schools 
whose instruments are books and scientific apparatus. These per- 
sons themselves have insensibly fallen into the belief that those are 
the only schools in which a man could be educated, and have claimed 
a kind of aristocracy of scholarship. This claim has generally been 
tacitly conceded by those who have never enjoyed those great ad- 
vantages — namely, the tradesmen and mechanics of the world ; even 
by such of them as have really attained great breadth of intellect 
and great humanity of heart. 

The result has been hurtful every way. 

On the side of the scholars of the library it has bred a disrespect 
for those who, however noble, have not had literary culture. Trade 
and the mechanic arts have been held as lower planes, on which 
only lower kind of men should work ; while tradesmen and mechanics 
have felt a kind of envy, sometimes of jealousy, of the men who, as 
they think, enjoy great honors without being practically useful to 
the world. Thus, trade has been at a discount in "society," and 
even tradesmen and mechanics have sought to use the wealth they 
have acquired in putting their children out of their own sphere ; and 
those children have acquired a contempt for the employments of 
their parents, and have become ashamed of the fact that their par- 
ents were mechanics and tradesmen. And some people of literary 
culture have learned to despise commerce, trade, and mechanical pur- 
suits, as having in them something, if not debasing, at least not ele- 
vating. 

The present speaker must by no means be understood to under- 
value the power there is in books and in the scholastic exercises of 
the library, the college, and the university. That power is incalcu- 
lable. Having been, perhaps, as little in the schools of trade as 
almost any other man of my age, and almost all my life conversant 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 593 

with the schools of literature and science, what culture I have is 
mainly due to these ; and they seem to me to be very great and 
beautiful, and useful to all such as know how to secure the vast ben- 
efits they give. But I should have missed the best of these if they 
had not liberalized me sufficiently to enable me to see the good there 
is in other modes of training. 

It is to be recollected that all men cannot be always engaged with 
books and with the investigations of the closet and the laboratory. 
Some men must work with hands alone, some with brains alone, 
some with brains and hands together. The results in the first, in the 
second, or in the third, may be base and debasing, but not neces- 
sarily. Each department may be a great school. In each the man 
may become nobler, more developed, better trained — that is, more 
able, after one piece of work of whatever kind, to do any other work 
of whatever kind a little better than before. 

The schools of book learning and the schools of business training 
are so mutually dependent that neither should disparage the other. 
The Galileo who, in his tower or wooded height above fair Florence, 
turns his tube toward the stars and spends his nights and days in 
observation and thought, is dependent on the tailor that makes his 
clothes and the mechanic that builds his lofty room and mends his 
instruments ; while every sailor, trader, and mechanic is dependent 
for the results of his voyages and the very tools with which he works, 
and the very rules by which he works, to the astronomer, the mathe- 
matician, the cloistered student who is working out the problems 
that underlie all practical business. We must not divorce thought 
from action nor action from thought. 

I now address men who are, or are about to be, in business, buying 
and selling the various articles of commerce and constructing those 
things which are necessary for the comfort, the activity, and the 
progress of the race. I come to talk to them of the educational force 
which resides in their pursuits, and I trust to win their confidence by 
the assertion that I believe that all that is sound in judgment , correct 
in reasoning, and excursive in imagination may be brought to bear, 
with as much certainty of their growth, upon the questions of com- 
merce, of the laws of trade, and of the multiform modes of business, 
as upon questions of natural philosophy, the higher mathematics, 



594 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

and statesmanship. I believe that if such men as La Place, Sir 
William Hamilton, and Daniel Webster had devoted their abilities 
to trade they would have become millionaires ; and that if John 
Jacob Astor, Peter Cooper, and Cornelius Vanderbilt had given 
themselves to the studies of the closet they would have become dis- 
tinguished philosophers, mathematicians, and statesmen. It is wisely 
directed mental-power, however and wherever gained, which lifts a man 
above the masses. 

He is the most fortunate of workers in the affairs of the world who 
has had the advantages of literary culture and of practical business 
life. For a man who intends to devote himself to a life of literature 
and science it is an estate to know a trade. For a man who intends 
to devote his life to business it is a treasure to have had the pre- 
paratory training of the schools. But if any of you cannot have both 
let me encourage them by showing them, if I can, that business not 
only promises the material result of increased wealth, but also may 
secure the more priceless possession of a well-developed manhood. 

The comparison is not to be made between the modes of education, 
but between the results. 

The professed object of all mental training is the thorough devel- 
opment of mental powers ; the preparation of the mind to meet the 
actual emergencies and reap the richest fruits of life. 

For this purpose the instrumentalities used in the schools are 
studies in the languages with their classics, in the natural sciences 
with their objects, and in the mathematics with their applications. 
This describes, in brief, the curriculum which has obtained in our 
highest schools for ages. What are believed to be the results of 
those studies? They are supposed to train a man to greater powers 
of observation, arrangement, memory, calculation, reasoning, i?idustry, 
self-control, and virtue. They are believed also to purify the taste 
and impart general intellectual elevation. Let us admit that they do. 
Let us suppose that, along with the classics, all the examples of hero- 
ism and self-sacrifice which the history of the great records have 
their due influence on the scholar's mind. This is all that is claimed. 
Let it all be granted. 

Now we turn to trade ; legitimate trade ; that interchange of com- 
modities and of the products of skill by which men acquire material 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 595 

property on right principles, by right methods, and for right uses. 
Take a man who has been trained for this and compare him with a 
merely literary man. If they change places is it not probable that 
the business man, with his well-trained mind, will as soon acquire all 
the learning of the litterateur as that the latter will learn all the ins 
and outs, the principles and practices, the far-reaching plans and use- 
ful applications of the former? 

In the preparation for business does not the commercial gymna- 
sium train a man to such results as are sought in our universities? 
Allow me to recapitulate them briefly, and to illustrate. 

To be a wise and successful tradesman a young man must train 
his powers of observation thoroughly. 

In this department, as in all others, the result of observation is 
the knowledge of the facts upon which must be based all great and 
practical generalizations ; they are the great stair-way to the lofty 
platform from which we survey the whole field of worldly operations. 
The tradesman or mechanic must cultivate his senses, those great 
instrumentalities of observation. He must learn to notice closely 
what is the intrinsic substance in any article which makes it at all 
valuable in the estimation of men, and he must learn what are those 
accidents which increase its commercial value. And he must ob- 
serve all those turns in trade which teach him when and what to 
buy, and when and what to sell. Can you perceive any thing in the 
experiments of the laboratory, or the researches of the naturalist, 
which more thoroughly trains a man's powers of observation than 
the purchase of groceries and dry goods, of woods, gums, leathers, 
furs, and the materials of which houses and ships and machinery are 
built ? A man who wants soap for his customers, and buys any 
thing that bears that name which the chandler chooses to offer him, 
is not likely to succeed. 

A man who has had close training in all departments of a retail 
and wholesale grocery would soon come to be a superior botanist, 
geologist, or chemist. A mechanic in the higher departments so 
studies color, form, and combination, that his work becomes akin to 
that of the artist. 

Few mental habits are so valuable as system. Without it all ac- 
cumulations of learning or property become heaps of trash. 



596 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

I once had a friend who was a walking encyclopedia. I have 
never heard him talk twenty minutes without learning something I 
never knew before or having some parts of my own old learning 
burnished. And yet I have seldom known a man whose learning 
was more useless to himself and to the world. His head was an 
Old Curiosity Shop, in which there was a specimen of all things ever 
walked in, eaten in, slept in, fought in, lived in, or died in ; and yet 
you could hardly furnish one decent small apartment with its con- 
tents. There were no bureau-drawers in his brain, as Napoleon said 
he had in his : one of which contained all he knew of one kind of 
things and another all he knew of another kind, and so arranged 
that he could open or shut them at pleasure. 

My friend lived to be an old man, and had had high scholastic ad- 
vantages. If he could have been five years an apprentice to Jeremiah 
Evarts or Stephen Girard, or any other excellent business man of his 
day, before going to his books, he would have rivaled Humboldt. 

The young man who enters upon trade is impressed with all the 
volumes of significance which are shelved away in that old adage, 
" A place for every thing and every thing in its place." The odds 
and ends of twine, the nail-box and hammer, and all the implements 
of the lowest offices of trade, as much have theirappropriate place 
as the ledger and the letter-book. I forget who has said that Sir 
James Mackintosh would have been one of the very greatest men 
England ever produced if he had known the important uses of red 
tape. The scholar in business has to make early acquisition of that 
lesson. And then he insensibly transfers this habit of system to his 
mental operations ; and if he knows less than his college-bred neigh- 
bor he may make better use of what he does know; and so in a few 
years he may not only outstrip him in business, but may actually 
outshine him in society. 

In regard to memory, the training of the schools, on the one hand, 
and the training of the shops and stores, on the other, contrast mainly 
in this : that the former uses words and the latter uses things. 

He who intends to compass great riches, or any other success in 
business, must have a long and a strong memory. He must remem- 
ber the history of all his failures and successes as he goes along, 
with the probable reasons. He must remember the history of cur- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 597 

rent trade as long as he has known it. He must remember the aver- 
age price of the commodities he deals in through a number of years, 
as that is the point upon which successful operation in articles of 
merchandise must turn. He must remember the faces, places, disposi- 
tions, prejudices, whims, business, business connections, habits of 
thought, and trade, of all his customers. He must remember where 
and how and when a great variety of articles can be had. In a word 
if Cicero says that an orator must know all things, I venture to say 
that a business man must remember all things. 

The preparation for the successful prosecution of business in- 
volves continual cultivation of the powers of calculation. 

The elements of numbers are to be perpetually combined, and 
these combinations are very often to be made mentally and rapidly, 
and without the aid of blackboards and slates. It is true that the 
schools carry their pupils up to the higher calculus, and sometimes 
employ them in applying mathematical formulae to the motion of 
the celestial bodies. But business men are applying similar princi- 
ples to all the motions of the governments of the world, as the 
political changes in states and empires are making daily impres- 
sions upon the value of all the articles of commerce. Then calcula- 
tion ascends from numbers to great principles, and all the forces 
and results of social operations are to be measured, estimated, and 
calculated. The movement of a single man in a community is to 
affect a hundred business houses, and these shoot their influences 
through all the minor nerves of the system. The business man has 
to calculate these effects in advance and to act upon his calcula- 
tions. If the astronomer blunders in his tables he may rectify the 
error. The temporary mistake will probably work him no personal 
harm. But if the business man blunders he cannot rectify — he has 
staked and lost thousands upon his calculation. This very fact 
leads to the utmost particularity and care. 

The same line of remark reaches the development of the reason- 
ing powers. 

The tradesman deals with realities, not abstractions, and tests the 
validity of his logical processes, not by the formal syllogism, but 
by what is more easy of inspection to most men, and more im- 
pressive in form, the balance-sheet, in his counting-house, and the 
38 



5 9 8 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



footing up of his bank-book. Probably there are no more abstruse, 
prolonged, and vigorous courses of reasoning conducted anywhere 
on earth than at our wharves and in our shops and counting-houses. 
And, other things being equal, he is the most successful man 
in trade who has best control over his power of examining the 
truth of propositions, of comparing those propositions, and of 
reaching safe and legitimate conclusions. He must have the states- 
man's ability. And he goes beyond the statesman often ; as the 
latter reasons from existing facts to inevitable conclusions simply so 
far as those conclusions reach his political status and affect his 
party, but the money-maker must do all that and then he must 
reason upon the changes which those results are to work upon trade 
generally, and upon himself and his investments particularly. 

The schools teach industry. 

All learning is the ant-like process of heaping sand-grains. And 
business — why, what does the word mean, if it does not imply sys- 
tematic industry ? Busy-ness is the very opposite of td/e-nQss. Its 
Latin mate, negotiunt, is very expressive ; nego otiutn, I deny myself 
ease — self-denial in order to accomplish a great purpose. 

If the scholar rise at the cock-crow, burn midnight oil, and work 
through the beautiful hours of day, cloistering himself when all the 
voices of nature call him out to sun himself in the sweet light and 
fan himself with the healthful breezes, there is the business man, 
up before the birds, plying his toil amid the carriages of pleasure 
and of trade, laboring in the sun and rain while others house them- 
selves, dreaming of green fields amid his sugar-casks and coffee- 
bags, his planes and saws and chisels, and writing up his account- 
books, while literary men are in the cozy lecture-room, or sitting in 
their libraries amid the singing bards or deep-eyed prophets of the 
earlier ages. If, in order to acquire learning, a man must separate 
himself and control himself, is not that virtue eminently cultivated 
by him who seeks to build up his fortunes in trade? 

No general who has thousands of men waiting his word of com- 
mand, no premier who has the helm of affairs in his hand, is oftener 
called upon to hold his spirit in the tight grasp of a will that 
seems to have no more tremor in it than a blacksmith's vice, than 
he whose whole fortune may depend upon the absence of flurry and 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 599 

the presence of the perfect, clear vision of a serene mind ; a self- 
equipoise to be maintained through hours and perhaps days. In the 
preparations for these prodigious emergencies the business boy is 
taught to keep his own counsel, to control his passions and his face, 
in dealing with every variety of customers — the grave, the gay, the 
sharp, the savage, and the weak. A slight act of discourtesy, a 
slight appearance of wrong dealing, even where there may be honest 
intent, will forfeit him a friend who might have poured wealth into 
his coffers. No act of the clerk can possibly be separated from the 
fortunes of the principal. Every where, at all hours, in all habits, 
enjoyments, amusements, labors, investments, and conversations, he 
must keep a strong hand upon himself. He is at once the steed 
and the charioteer, and must live at both ends of the reins, with all 
his power and all his prudence. 

Talk of virtue — talk of schools of virtue — talk of the old heroic 
examples ! Let the world listen and admire and learn while you 
talk. But remember that virtue is the strength which turns aside 
from w r rong when wrong is very near and very wooing and very 
beautiful. Where are such exhibitions? In the churches and col- 
leges alone ? No. They are also where trade thrives or declines, 
where personal interest and fortune are pressing, where temptation 
becomes powerful in all the array of what men most do covet, 
when the spirit of the palace and the demon of the poor-house are 
standing apparently in contest for the man. Then, when he does 
right regardless of palace or poor-house, he is a moral hero. 

And thousands do it. Thousands in this city have done it ; have 
conquered — have wrestled down the temptation — and have gone on 
their way unenriched in their coffers but prosperous in their souls. 

It is easy to sit in cushioned arm-chairs and write about the base- 
ness of commerce ; it is easy for good souls who have no tempta- 
tions, whose piety is perpetually bolstered by prosperity and 
nursed by gilt-edged and morocco-bound books of morals and books 
of prayer, to launch anathemas against those who fall in the violent 
trials of trade and money-making. 

But who of us are so just, I will not say so generous, as to laud 
the blessed victors in the strife: the apprentice, the clerk, the master- 
mechanic and the merchant who have done right in the dark ; who 



600 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

have had the opportunity of laying hundreds on the credit side of 
the bank-book yet have not done it, because it would be dishonora- 
ble, but have dared to do right, although doing wrong seemed to 
promise instant relief from immense embarrassments? 

I thank God and I love humanity more when I think of such 
conquests. 

There goes one of those noble men to his home. The day's toil 
is done. He has barely made enough to meet his narrow expenses. 
He carries to his economical household the aching head and the toil- 
beat nerve. None but God has seen the immense temptation of 
the day. None but God has seen how he wrestled with it and how 
he has risen above the strife. He looks into his cheap evening 
paper while the tea-kettle sings on the grate, and there he sees 
paraded some generous act which costs the wealthy actor no sacrifice. 
Some little social hero is crowned, and he, the weary one, who has 
done more that day than defend Thermopylse, shall never hear 
any voice in his praise, shall never see any chronicle of his prowess, 
until the books of eternity be blazoned before immortal eyes. Then 
these records shall come. Then our wharves and shops shall send 
up troops of men and boys, the noble army of money-makers and 
trade-martyrs, who shall outrank Leonidas and Wellington. 

Do some fall? Are some too weak for the strife? Bethink you 
how many fall in the less hazardous, less tempting, less toilful path 
of easy social life. Think how many fall when apparently sur- 
rounded by all that can drive away the evil and cherish the good. 
As a clergyman and a man of books it becomes the present 
speaker to be charitable toward the men of trade. He has seen too 
many sink in schools, and alas ! alas ! too much wrong-doing in 
religous communities, to allow him to be savage with the sinners of 
the market-place. He has no apology for the one or the other, but 
prays God's mercy and man's charity for all : 

" Owning their weakness, 
Their evil behavior ; 
And leaving, with meekness, 
Their sins to their Saviour." 

Do you say that in trade there is much concealed crime? that men 
succeed in their oppressions and wrong-doings, reap the fruits, live 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 6oi 

in splendor, die, and are bepraiscd in funeral eulogies? That may- 
be. The day of full Apocalypse has not yet come. But show me 
the spot or rank of life of which this is not equally true. If the 
veil could be lifted, if all hearts could be known, if every history 
could be read, which of our professions, pursuits, or orders could 
escape ? Of all who do preserve their reputation calculate the few 
opportunities they may have had for sinning, and then add what so 
largely prevails every where, the wondrous " art of hiding " — and 
what would the showing be ? Would not our fashionable avenues 
present as loathsome a moral sight as Wall Street, or the docks 
along our river, or the factories on our water-course ? Let all the 
soft and silken sinners of our shaded and scholastic retreats be 
stripped and lashed into the crowd of detected defaulters, and then 
you shall have fair chance to make a comparison. If money-mak- 
ing trade does multiply temptations so much the greater the moral 
victory of those who conquer. A triumph where no battle hath 
been is worse than empty pageantry. 

And if now and then some greater wrong-doer meets with exposure, 
and some have been detected in the minor tricks of trade, let the men 
of the schools have charity ; let them not from their secure retreat 
taunt the poor swimmer in his agony as he sinks in the struggle to 
cross a current too deep, too wide, and too rapid for his powers. I 
would that all the world would commit to memory — nay, let me use 
the better, wiser, deeper phrase of childhood : I would that all the 
world would " get by heart " those richly human stanzas of poor 
Burns: 

"Then gently scan your brother man, 
And gentler sister woman ; 
Though they may gang a kennin' wrang, 
To step aside is human. 

One point must still be greatly dark, 

The moving why they do it ; 
And just as lamely can ye mark 

How far perhaps they rue it. 

" Who made the heart, 'tis He alone 
Decidedly can try us ; 
Me knows each chord — its various tone ; 
Each spring — its various bias. 



602 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

Then at the balance let's be mute. 

We never can adjust it ; 
What's done we partly may compute, 

But know not what's resisted." 

The product of a trained hand gives great pleasure to the producer, 
as the product of an educated mind does. What a delight to an 
author is his completed book, his well-wrought argument, his polished 
poem, his finished oration ! But every merchant or mechanic who 
does his work conscientiously and thoroughly has this great joy. 

A large business may be conducted bunglingly, although with 
great power. Sometimes fortunes are made in this way, the force of 
the worker achieving success in spite of his mistakes. But he might 
have done more by doing it better. There may be, and generally 
in case of success there is, a kind of rhythm and roundness, so that 
the history of a merchant prince is an epic. There are harmonies 
and melodies in a great life-work in business, which insensibly im- 
prove the tone of character. As a man comes more and more to per- 
ceive these, and to conduct his trade in accord with these, his tastes 
purify, even as his prejudices melt under the warmth of human 
contact. He may begin as a mere bellows-blower to an organist, 
but rise to be a master composer. He may begin as a mere chip- 
per of the rude corners of blocks of marble, but rise to be a real 
artist in sculpture. 

In any mechanical or mercantile pursuit a man may learn only 
what is necessary for utility — may care to know only how to do 
any thing without choosing to learn why the thing should be done 
in that way. But this is not necessary. If a mechanic or trades- 
man has a love for the beautiful, the ideal of beauty, he may both 
improve and gratify his taste by a study of the principles of his 
work ; and this culture, far from retarding, will greatly promote his 
material success. More and more, I think, will men come to see 
that there is an aesthetic side to the arts of business, as there is an 
aesthetic side to the arts of sensation and sentiment. A lawyer need 
not be a pettifogging drudge nor a physician a mere empiric ; nor 
is it necessary that a business man should always remain a mere 
buying-and-selling machine. The reign of law is as completely 
sovereign in trade as it is in the plastic arts. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 603 

What high delights belong to the merchants and mechanics of a 
great city ! The former see their gains invested in vast and beau- 
tiful edifices and machinery, erected or manufactured by the hands 
and the skill of the latter ; and the latter, apart from all consider- 
ations of their growing reputation and of accumulated property, 
have a special aesthetic pleasure in contemplating their work. This 
is true, whether, with one philosopher, we consider aesthetics to be 
the idea of the beautiful as an indistinct perception or feeling ac- 
companying moral ideas, or with others identify the idea of the 
beautiful with the idea of the good. 

A carpenter may have done some work admirably well. It may 
be a warehouse, a mansion, a college, a ship, a church. He may 
fancy the vast heaps of merchandise piled in rooms that he has 
built, upheld by sleepers and joists that he has placed, and covered 
by roofs resting on rafters which he has constructed. Then he may 
walk up and down before a goodly mansion which he has helped to 
erect and think of the handsome men and beautiful women danc- 
ing on the floor that he has tongued and grooved, and the banquets 
eaten in dining-rooms he has finished, and of babies sleeping 
sweetly in nurseries which he has built. And then he may, in fancy, 
behold pale students over their books in cloistered colleges the lay- 
ing of whose bricks he had superintended and whose wainscoting 
was finished by his hands — scholars enjoying cozy " studies " which 
he could never have, but which his hands had made. And then it 
may be a ship, so taut and stanch because he has done his work 
so well down in the under part of the vessel, which no eye could 
see, but which would keep her good and strong for many a voyage. 
And then it may be a church, in which the wood-work of his hand 
may be resonant with the eloquence of the devoted preachers and 
the music of the singing multitudes; and when he passes it, and 
sees the portals he has made, he may rejoice in the gates of the 
house of God with great joy. 

Besides the cultivation and gratification of the aesthetic faculty 
mechanics and tradesmen may have in view also the accumulation 
of such possessions as shall lift them out of the cold pit of poverty 
and set them in large and wealthy places, materially and morally. 

We have heard much praise of poverty as an ally of genius and 



604 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

an incentive to effort. It has been thought unfortunate for a poet 
to prosper. The cold garret is supposed to be the favorite bovver 
of the muses. Very much such rhetoric is in our books of verse 
and prose, in our sedate lectures and pompous orations. We be- 
lieve the whole theory to be false. It is founded upon a wrong 
view of man and of life. God made man so that easy labor should 
produce competence and that large portions of his time should be 
employed in exposing his mind and heart to all the delicious ripen- 
ing effects of sunshine and nature's balmy breath. The greater the 
labor and the less the good and beautiful time spent among good 
and beautiful thoughts, the worse for the man ; and when all the time, 
all the muscle, all the nerve must be wrung out by the demands of 
labor, then the man is totally expelled from paradise. Whatever 
on that score he can safely avoid is so much of paradise regained. 

In support of this opinion I quote the authority of a remark- 
able English writer. Twenty years ago the British and American 
periodicals contained certain fugitive poems having great beauty of 
expression and a certain intense passionateness. They are from 
the pen of Gerald Massey, a poor boy — born and reared in a hovel 
too low for a man to stand upright therein ; a boy who early entered 
one of the factories where English white slaves do such toil as 
never befell American plantation-laborers, and received therefor 
twenty-five cents a week ; a boy who, when that same factory 
burned down, " stood for twelve hours in the wind and sleet and 
mud, rejoicing in the conflagration which thus liberated him." 
Above that sad condition he rose to sing songs which have thrilled 
thousands on both sides of the Atlantic. Hear him : 

" My experience tells me that poverty is inimical to the develop- 
ment of humanity's noblest attributes. Poverty is a never-ceasing 
struggle for the means of living, and it makes one hard and selfish. 
To be sure, noble lives have been wrought out in the sternest 
poverty. Many such are being wrought now by the unknown heroes 
and martyrs of the poor. I have known men and women in the 
very worst circumstances to whom heroism seemed a heritage, and 
to be noble a natural way of living. But they were so in spite of 
their poverty, not because of it. When Christ said, " Blessed are 
they who suffer," he did not speak of those who suffer from want 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 605 

and hunger, and who always see the Bastile looming up and blotting 
out the sky of their future. Such suffering brutalizes. True natures 
ripen and strengthen in suffering; but it is that suffering which 
chastens and ennobles — that which clears the spiritual sight; not the 
anxiety lest work should fail and the want of daily bread. The 
beauty of suffering is not to be read in the face of hunger." 

Now, one great object of all true efforts in trade is deliverance 
from the degrading. It is the struggle to get out of the shadow 
into the sun. Shall we denounce that? No, no. Let us bid every 
right-hearted workman work on, work wisely, run the race with the 
prize never absent from his view, and fight the battle in full vision 
of the victory and triumph. 

Honor to the poet, say we ; to him who has set any one of God's 
truths to music which shall make millions of hearts chorus it to one 
another ! Honor to the teacher, who plants the oak-germ of many a 
tree which is to wave its glory above its strength in the great forest 
of humanity! Honor to the preacher, pure and powerful, who, on 
the eyes of those absorbed in the present and the perishing, presses 
the vision of the grand principles which engirdle the universe and 
fetches the realities of eternity down to confound the phantoms 
which dance so deceivingly around us ! 

But let not another be forgotten in our paeans. Before we part 
let us look in on him. 

There he is amid all his work : the wise and successful tradesman, 
the toiling and prosperous mechanic. See his plans. They are as 
wide as the world, and their end is in the highest heaven. Their 
path is every-where, their aids are all things. He has never 
adopted 

" The simple plan 

That they shall take who have the power, 
And they shall keep who can." 

He has never rendered the worship of his heart to gold : 

" Gold, gold, gold, 

Bright and heavy, hard and cold, 

Heavy to get, and light to hold." 

Gold is his slave, and not his master. Gold is the sign, and not 
the thing signified. Gold is the means, and not the end. 



606 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

How skillfully he detects the nature and relation of things ! How 
strongly he holds all things, nothing holding him ! 

Calculate, if you can, the value of such a man. See how power- 
fully his example stimulates every-where — how many learn from 
him the practical uses of all high virtues, and how the laws of 
heaven are to be fulfilled on earth. Observe how many little fami- 
lies draw the waters of life which flow from this great central 
reservoir — to how many children he shall never see he sends tides 
of joy and happiness. Behold how his mind expands, and how his 
heart purifies, and how he links himself with all things human. It 
is he, and such as he, that built that school for the bare-footed boys 
and erected that college for our growing youths. It is he who shot 
that church-spire to the skies, planted that pulpit, and sustained the 
" man of God " who teaches all communities the principles which 
preserve order, suppress vice, diminish the woes and multiply the 
hopes and joys of our struggling humanity. He finds time to look 
from himself to others and learns the vast lesson of an interlinked 
and indissoluble brotherhood. He is the father of the sciences and 
the lover of the arts. The low men and the low things he comes 
in contact with do not spoil his lofty spirit; he beautifies them, 
as the sunbeam is never tainted by the cess-pool upon which it falls, 
but out of that corruption brings up a beauty and a blessing. 

Ye noble host of laborers, I would it were mine to give you a 
right brotherly and scholarly benediction. Let your part be truly, 
fully done, in showing the world that trade is a science, an art, a 
philosophy — nay, a very piety itself. Let every store and shop be a 
school, every chair a pulpit, every man a preacher of the true and 
a doer of the noble ; and all your shops and warehouses and wharves 
will brighten, poets will come and harp among you, as minstrels did 
of old in lordly castles and high ladies' bowers ; and philosophy shall 
find that the academy and the porch of the nineteenth century are 
where men are applying to the Present all the lore of the Past, and 
creating physical and spiritual beauties to live in the future. 

And wherever we are, whatever field or garden we till, whether 
our place be the parlor, the studio, the counter, the mechanic's 
bench, the farmer's field, whether our calling be handicraft or brain- 
craft, whether the scholar's learning or the trademan's coffers prom- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 607 

ise us the key that opens the gate of glory, let us duly remember 
the warning of the poet bard of Scotland, who struggled in his toil 
— the Actseon of spirit gripped by the Hercules of passion — who fell 
with his heart full of such sorrows and his mouth full of such pleas 
as should move us all : 

" It's no in titles nor in rank, 

It's no in wealth like Lon'on bank, 

To purchase peace and rest ; 
It's no in making muckle mair, 
It's no in books, it's no in lear, 

To make us truly blest ; 
If happiness have not her seat 

And center in the breast, 
We may be wise, or rich, or great, 

But never can be blest ! 
Nae treasures nor pleasures could make us happy lang ; 
The heart ay's the part ay that makes us right or wrang." 



TRADE-LIFE. : ITS POETRY AND ETHICS. 

[An Address first delivered before the Library Association of Petersburg, Va. 
March 16, 1855.] 

Ladies and Gentlemen — To engage your attention a short 
time for entertainment, and I hope instruction, I propose the con- 
sideration of Trade-Life in some of its poetical and moral aspects. 
And this selection is made for precisely the reasons which some 
might urge as setting it aside from our purposes ; namely, that many 
who hear me may suppose themselves not directly concerned in this 
matter, that it is believed by many to be destitute not only of the 
elements of poetry but of humane developments, and that it is not 
immediately connected with the studies and pursuits of the present 
lecturer. 

For purposes of mere brilliant success it is thought that a man 
should be absorbed in the business he has in hand, and should so 
suffer his faculties to be engrossed and his capabilities to be enchained 
by his own occupation as to find neither time nor inclination to interest 
himself in the pursuits of his fellows. This is partly true and partly 
false. Concentration of energies, like concentration of troops, will 
carry a battery or break a solid square ; but no power conducts a cam- 



608 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

paign without considering the status and operations of all other 
powers. So in our several callings. There is no trade and no pro- 
fessional employment which may not — and for its complete success 
must not — understand its relations to all other trades and employ- 
ments. Our danger is in isolation. The whole power of selfishness 
draws us back from other men to our own lines of work, while a 
wise self-love would lead us to connect our toils with those of others 
for the double purpose of advancing them and of advancing our- 
selves. 

We are taught by science that the smallest particles of matter 
exert attractive influences upon the largest masses as certainly, 
although not as powerfully, as the largest masses upon the most 
minute atoms. This is true in trade. The most abject little bare- 
footed peddler of matches in your city as surely affects the whole- 
sale importer, and the astute lawyer, and the ablest clergyman, and 
the most beautiful belle as the great mass of trading, talking, smil- 
ing, teaching, and governing society affects him. He is a drop in 
the chemical compound, modified by all and modifying all. He is 
not to be neglected in the analysis. 

And so on a larger scale the departments of human actions inter- 
flow and interwork. Agriculture, mechanism, smaller trade, larger 
commerce, and clerical, legal, and medical operations, are inter- 
dependent. Is it modest to select my own profession for illustration ? 
Well, then : the clergyman whose whole life is spent in studying 
the mummies of old philosophies, the fleshless skeletons of scholastic 
systems, will become a very learned man without doubt, and will 
astound his parishioners who can keep awake during his sermons ; 
but if he expect to make them feel the powerful doctrines and grand 
truths of the people's Christ he must study the workings of mind in 
him who follows the plow, must investigate the relations of the 
spinning-jenny and the locomotive to the apparatus of the Church, 
must survey the capabilities of trade and commerce, the special 
trials of those engaged therein, and the bearing of Christian ethics 
upon their vicissitudes of depression and success. The Sermon on 
the Mount must be carried home to the business and bosoms of 
artists and artisans. The preacher may find himself improved by 
beginning the preparation of his discourses on his knees in his closet 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 609 

and completing them on the docks, in the shops, and counting- 
houses, and market-places. 

No lawyer will injure his prospects at the bar by studying the 
large and quickening principles of Bible theology ; the theologian 
will find himself liberalized by an investigation of the elements of 
common law, that great embodiment of the great world's common 
sense; and the physician should know the laws of mind and the 
effect of brain-labor and hand-labor and the pressure of society 
upon individual growth, health, and activities. 

If these general views be correct there is no man and no woman 
who is not interested in trade-life. Trade, that occupies such vast 
numbers of our fellow-beings ; trade, that penetrates every hamlet, 
every cave, every swamp ; trade, that has existed from the beginnings 
of the growth of human society ; trade, that has made so many 
pages of history, sacred and profane ; trade, that has explored con- 
tinents, discovered islands, thawed the poles and cooled the equator; 
trade, that has engaged so many minds in the consideration of its 
social and ethical principles ; trade, that sends sap to the extremest 
twig of the social tree ; trade, that has begemmed the world with 
cities and embroidered the seas with fleets ; surely, trade, the great 
golden girdle of human brotherhood, demands our profound con- 
templation. 

There are those, affecting to be very refined, who shrink from trade 
and trades-people as actually contaminating. They sit in luxuriously 
soft carriages, and have goods brought to them by their footmen, 
and have a sweet horror of labor ; hold soft white hands at premium 
and touch every article of trade through kid. They count in their 
set and ticket to their drawing-rooms only such persons as neither 
labor nor have labored. The strenuosity with which they abstract 
themselves from trade and merchant-life should find compassion in 
our eyes. The " grandmammas " of some of them purchased ap- 
ples by the wholesale from the " grandpapas " of others, and retailed 
them at the corners of the streets. Peddlers and hucksters, most 
respectable people, were the foundation of the house ; and, like most 
houses, the strongest and best part is under ground, and the lac- 
quered and tinseled cornice hath great trepidation, lest some rude 
wind should blow aside the loose earth and reveal the rough 



6 io CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

but strong granite on which the edifice reposes. Poor, delicate 
cornice ! 

There are other some who are prodigious philosophers. They 
excoriate the husk, penetrate the kernel, and pronounce trade a low 
earth-work and debasing ; groveling ; a slave-toil for besmalling ends. 
They would have all the people who trade and traffic, who compre- 
hend the philosophy of percentum and who study the prices-current, 
to turn from such despicable waste of mind-strength and occupy 
their abilities on the sublime contemplation of transcendental the- 
ories. Such a philosopher comes to some hard-working merchant 
at his counter and addresses him after this fashion : " Friend, know- 
est thou that thou art a man and hast a soul in thee ; a live soul ? Is 
it thy life-purpose to hoard and hoard and walk the tread-mill of 
interminable trade ? Wilt thou sink thy God-given force, thy sacred 
celestial life-essence, to the ignobleness of ledgerdom ? Thy tongue 
should give soul-utterances to darkened humanity, and talkest thou 
in the jargon of pounds, shillings, and pence — dollars, dimes, and 
cents? Hateful jingle ! Abandon thy mammonish superfluity of 
desire, and come up to serene and manful comprehension of the 
great life-problems/' 

Now, our friend, the merchant aforesaid, is a plain, practical man, 
and in the profound sentences of our philosophic friend he barely 
sees ideas standing as men dimly see trees in moonshine. The mer- 
chant commenced life with little beyond his common sense and 
strong resolution ; but he is rearing his family respectably, lives in a 
comfortable house, clothes and feeds and schools his children, and 
is laying up something against a rainy day. From his own labor 
he perceives material results, while he sees the philosopher in 
threadbare coats, knows that his family are huddled in a garret 
while he is refining upon ideal philosophy, and that his children 
shiver in thin garments while the father is in raptures over Sartor 
Resartus. The merchant has dipped into that book and come away 
with no diminished respect for dry-goods in the piece or dry-goods 
made up. 

Both these, our friends, may be wrong — and probably are ; because 
both are ultra. There is such a thing as drawing out truths to so 
fine a thread that they will sustain nothing real or practical ; and 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 6ll 

then there is such a thing as becoming blind to the great principles 
which underlie all labor, and elevate all toil, and sanctify all suffer- 
ing, and refine all gross and sensuous things. Let our merchant 
friend remember that there are quacks in philosophy, as there are 
" confidence men " and " Peter Funks " in trade, and that philosophy 
rightly pursued is a high and blessed and blessing thing ; that there 
are noble men who bring strong, clear intellects to the elucidation 
of principles which have quickened the commerce of the nations 
and brought thousands into his coffers. Let him remember that 
these men are unassuming and modest, and that while they are 
bountifully enriching others they are often very needy and seldom 
very rich. And let the retired, contemplative student of principles 
remember that many a man who has the dust of the packing-room 
in his hair has many a thought that runs parallel with his own ele- 
vated line of thinking, and wraps itself around the bulk of com- 
merce and comprehends the operations which promote the wealth 
of nations. Let Girard and Astor reverence Adam Smith, and let 
Adam Smith cherish very high respect for Astor and Girard. 

"There is no poetry in trade ; it is low and dirty." So says a 
sentimental miss, and so believe the most of men. Whether there 
be poetic elements in any subject depends much more upon the 
eyes which look on it than upon the subject itself. To many men 
there is no poetry in the stars, no grandeur in Niagara, no music in 
the breathings of God upon the harp-strings of primeval forests. 
Unmindful of results, such observers would regard a bargain as a 
mere bargain ; a caravan as so many ugly camels and stupid drivers. 
They belong to the class of Wordsworth's potter : 

" A primrose by a river's brim 

A yellow primrose was to him, 

And it was nothing more." 

" The Iliad for War and the Odyssey for Wandering, but where is 
the great domestic epic ? " quotes one English writer from another, 
and adds, " Where is the great commercial epic? " We say, " Not 
written yet, but it will be written." A distinguished critic of He- 
brew poetry combats the common notion that epic poetry is the 
earliest. He believes the epics were preceded by unwritten lyrics, 



6i2 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

which were not preserved, and the epic has seized the precedence 
by the fact that it was the first written. The lyrics of labor and 
commerce have begun to sparkle in our literature. 

I pass by the sea-songs which trade has wakened on her watery 
way. There are two other poems in the English language which 
must live while men have hearts to sympathize with suffering, strug- 
gling weakness, or to draw sap into their manhood from the noble 
independence of the rigorous, successful worker. I quote them 
because both subjects are the farthest removed from the refined and 
the grand, and are pearls plucked from the deepest and murkiest 
waters of the pool of trade, and because each has a moral for 
him that idles and for him that toils. I allude to Hood's " Song of 
the Shirt" and Longfellow's " Village Blacksmith." 

A more unpoetic place than a bare garret, a more unpoetic person 
than a thin, sallow seamstress, and a more unpoetic article of rai- 
ment than a shirt it were rather difficult to imagine. And yet the 
poet has invested these all with a radiance which will stream over 
Christendom and down all time. The faculty divine has snatched 
the thread from the seamstress's attenuated fingers and attached it 
to the great thread whereof the woof of humanity is woven. 

Our Longfellow sings in another strain. His hero is a man, large 
and strong, but working for the feet of the horses which draw the 
drays of trade and commerce. The poem is an intellectual and 
moral tonic. The blacksmith is no myth, no fictitious personage. 
He has a rough hand, but it wipes a tear from eyes not yet dried 
by the fires of the forge. And blessed are the merchantmen who 
do not sell their tears ! A very prosy place is a smithy, dark 
and dirty; but it is hence to be a Vulcanic palace, teaching men 
the great lesson of shaping their fortunes by their own vigorous 
blows. 

[In delivering the address Hood's "Song of the Shirt" and 
Longfellow's " The Village Blacksmith " were repeated, but they 
are so familiar that I will not reproduce them in this volume.] 

These poems show what poets can see in trade and in the very 
lowest forms of mechanic production. And there are the writings 
of the powerful "Corn-Law Rhymer" and of " Barry Cornwall," 
whose poetry, Lord Jeffrey says, " laps us up from the eating cares 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 613 

of life in visions so soft and bright as to sink like morning dreams 
on our senses." And there are the " Songs of Labor," by Whittier, 
whose " Shoemakers " is a ballad having the genuine ring of song in 
its music, and links the labors of a humble mechanic's shop with 
far-off and poetic places. And there is the fact that poets are com- 
ing up from such shops with fancies which rival the delicacies and 
gentlenesses of poet-laureates. Who shall hereafter say there is 
no poetry in trade? 

Survey the past, and see what trade has done for history. Nations 
grew to greatness from their geographic positions, and these posi- 
tions had reference to advantageous trade. The necessities of men 
demanded that time should not be wasted in the pursuit of purchasers 
for the products of the fields and the fabrics of the workshops. 
Hence sprang merchants. The quickened streams of trade filled up. 
the ready reservoirs, and new channels were to be opened, and thus- 
came commerce. And commerce brought luxuries and ornaments 
as well as new comforts, and hence new distinctions in society, for 
which personal and family ambition struggled. These struggles 
extended to nations, and hence wars and all the heroic parts of 
history and poetry. Repugnant as the theory may be to some 
scholars it is nevertheless true that the great expeditions on land 
and water, the great achievements which have covered the actors 
therein with glory, and been the foundation of history and the 
themes for song, have all been wrought and fought for trade. The 
desire to protect interests already established and to snatch pros- 
pective monopolies has kindled the martial blaze in all ages, from 
the day that Jason launched the Argo in the harbor of Iolchus 
down to the fall of Sevastopol. 

Scholars love to dwell upon the glorious literature of the ancients, 
and the monuments of their progress and renown, without having 
much thought for, and certainly having no enthusiasm over, the 
low, small agencies of such stupendous results. The grandeur of 
the Assyrian monarchy, as held before the lights of history, sacred 
and profane, and as exhumed by the industry of Layard and others, 
Nineveh glittering on the Tigris, and Babylon surrounded by a 
wondrous extent of solid masonry, are subjects of industrious 

study and profound admiration ; but who gives to trade its rightful 
89 



6 14 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

place in the glory of erecting cities which to our modern fancy seem 
to island the barren sea of the past and shine in a mist we cannot 
penetrate ? Athens, the star of Greece, with all its poetry, philoso- 
phy, legislation, and heroism, will lend light to literature as long 
as letters survive, but the Areopagus, the Academy, and the Porch 
had had no existence without the port of Piraeus. The eye of 
literary enthusiasm flashes in the sunlight of genius as it watches 
the flight of Pindar, eagle of song — 

"The pride and ample pinion 

That the Theban eagle bare, 
Sailing with supreme dominion 

Through the azure deep of air " — 

soaring and screaming in the heaven of mind, and gazes awe-struck 
upon the vast human woes which surge irt the tragedies of ^Eschylus, 
Sophocles, and Euripides ; it appreciates the sagacity which founded 
the Grecian games, at which the histories of Herodotus and Thucyd- 
ides were interspersed with the lyrics of Anacreon and the higher 
songs of the great tragic poets we have mentioned ; but it fails to see 
that it was trade which drew the thousands, the ol noXXol, the masses, 
and that these crowds were in the place of our newspapers, maga- 
zines, and quickly and cheaply produced books, and that the shout of 
those crowds was reputation, startling the echoes of succeeding cen- 
turies. It was personal interest which drew together sufficient 
numbers to kindle the fire of emulation in the minds of the gifted. 

It may not be uninteresting to examine two notable illustrations 
of the fact that trade makes history. 

We select, first of these, the period of the fall of the Assyrian 
Empire. One of the influential monarchies which rose on its ruins 
was the Lydian, whose most important history begins with the 
arrival of Gyges at the throne. This monarch fixed his capital at 
Sardis, in the midst of a productive country. The people were in- 
dustrious, and brought from their fertile soil more than a necessary 
supply for the wants of the population. They were therefore led 
into large commercial transactions, which were increased by their 
skill in various arts and manufactures. It is believed that they first 
used a stamped metallic currency, their river Pactolus yielding gold 



FOR E VER Y FIRESIDE. 6 1 5 

with its sands. To the west of this thrifty people were the Greeks, 
and near them the Grecian cities of Miletus and Phocsea. From 
the Lydians the Greeks learned to work in metals, to weave, and to 
make the beautiful dye called Lydian purple ; and thus the whole 
Grecian character received an impulse in trade and general cultiva- 
tion. Moreover, while Lydia was productive, it was inland and 
could not transport, and so the commercial Grecian cities on the 
coast were made immensely wealthy by the Lydian trade and en- 
riched the Lydians in return. Miletus became very powerful and 
planted at least eighty colonies — one hundred and eighty, if Seneca 
made no mistake. It also produced two of the seven wise men of 
Greece. The Phocaeans left their city when Cyrus carried his con- 
quests through Asia Minor, and, after various enterprises, located 
themselves in Gaul and built the city which they called Massilia, 
and which now bears the name of Marseilles. 

We perceive in this case how the productive pecuniary operations 
of that small but important monarchy made the history of the great 
Greek people in first giving them the stimulus which elevated them 
into consideration and brought them into the great race of nations ; 
and an acute English author says of Athens, the city of Greece, 
u her greatness was essential to the intellectual energy of her sons, 
and the fruits of that intellectual energy, all rhetorical common- 
place apart, have largely contributed to the enjoyment, to the re- 
finement, to the freedom, and to the well-being of mankind. '' 

Again, it is interesting to consider how the mere trade interests 
of Marseilles have modified the fortunes of France, and what they 
have had to do with the grand projects and brilliant achievements 
of Bonaparte, how they stood related to his famous continental sys- 
tem, and thus connect the movements of Croesus and Cyrus with 
those of Napoleon and Wellington, and the siege of Sardis with the 
catastrophe of Waterloo. In several different ways may it be shown 
that the great cable of trade, stretching over the chasm of thou- 
sands of years, sustains the bannered trophies of war and the brilliant 
monuments of peace. 

Another illustration is found in the case of Great Britain ; an un- 
inviting island rising from the cold seas of the North, visited by the 
Romans for its little trade, yet gradually growing and improving its 



6l6 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

physical advantages, until Rome has sunk from Caesar's grasp to the 
timid hand of a driveling priest while the little queen of Britain 
shakes the land and sea with the thunder of her power. What 
would be Oxford, and what Cambridge, if Liverpool and Manches- 
ter were not ? Her artisans have supported her artists, and that 
nation of shop-keepers is the nation of Bacon, Locke, Newton, 
Shakespeare, and Milton. The East India Company, an imperium 
in imperio, shows how trade makes history. A joint-stock associa- 
tion, chartered anno 1600 to trade with the countries eastward of 
the Cape of Good Hope, has grown into a power whose governors- 
general almost take rank in history with hereditary potentates. It 
has its legislative, judicial, and military history, and has been the field 
upon which some of the most distinguished names of England's 
heroic men made their debut for immortality. Strike from history 
all that the East India Company has done and caused to be done 
during the last two centuries, and you shorten the column of Fame. 

See what trade has done for the face of nature. Where forests 
grew there stand the lofty chimneys of the smoking workshops in 
which men toil the week through, and there the bright spires of the 
churches where the weary workers betake their souls for solace on 
the Sabbath-day. The far-off inland seas are tied by the shining 
threads of canals to the great ocean. Hills sink, and valleys rise, 
and the thundering locomotive whirls the man of business to his 
place of labor, the literary man to his chair of instruction, the belle 
to the party of pleasure, and the philanthropist to the scene of suffer- 
ing. To him who from some lofty mountain-top looks down upon 
the valley and the plain there is no longer the unbroken density of 
dark forests, but cheery farm-houses, fenced fields, sleeping herds, 
moving vehicles, the factory of him who is growing rich, and the 
palace of him that has grown rich. The song of the drover, the ring 
of the anvil, the stroke of the hammer, and the whizz of the saw 
come up to him mingled with the chiming of bells and the shouts 
of merry school-children. Trade has not only built her workshops, 
but she hath laid out upon the bosom of the earth the school-house, 
the lyceum, and the university. She hath waked the world to labor 
and set its activities to music. 

Let religion acknowledge her debt to trade. The life, the stir, 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 617 

the movement of the working world have aroused the mind of man 
to consider questions which rise far above those discussed in the 
chamber of commerce, on the exchange, and at the boards of 
council. Trade has built colleges and churches and hospitals for 
Religion. Trade has brought of her substance to lay on the altars 
of Christianity. Trade has cut through jungles to make a path for 
the missionary and has unfurled her snow-white sails, like wings of 
doves, to bear the man of God to the ice-mountains of Greenland, 
to India's coral strands, to Africa's sunny fountains and many an 
ancient river and many a palmy plain. The Bible was needed, and 
the minister ; but there were also needed the adze and hammer and 
saw of the mechanic, the depot of the grain merchant and the coffer 
of the banker. It is a great mistake to suppose that the pursuit of 
trade, whether upon a small or a large scale, necessarily interferes 
with the cultivation of the habits of piety. Christianity is adapted 
to every pursuit of man. It goes down to every business and sanc- 
tifies it. It seizes upon every opening, travels in every train of trans- 
port, mingles in the crowds of the markets, and intones the hymns 
of Zion with the shout of mule-drivers, the songs of the workshops, 
the jingling bells of slow-paced caravans, the roar of furnaces, and 
the flash of ocean-steamer's wheels. To him who has consecrated 
his faculties to the progress of the cross it is most interesting to 
feel that every noise which resounds through dockyards, that every 
cart which bears its burden of dirt along the line of a growing rail- 
way, that every post which rises to hold up the threads of the elec- 
tric telegraph, and that every ladle of molten iron which is poured 
into molds to make machinery — that all these are working for Christ. 
The nations woke to literature, to trade, and to religion, at once. 
The night which made the Dark Ages rolled off to leave in full dis- 
play the press, the workshop, and the Church. Merchant princes have 
been the nursing fathers of the Church, and wherever a wholesome 
activity has been aroused there religion has had her office. There 
is nothing in the doctrines of the Bible and the processes of spiritual 
regeneration consistent with slothfulness. Our most holy faith 
finds its largest and most glorious triumphs among the busiest and 
most prosperous people. Trade is the handmaid of religion and 
religion is the sanctifier of trade. 



618 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

In no period of history has trade been pushed with the vigor and 
intelligence which mark the present. In no period has so much cul- 
tivated intellect been devoted to the interests of trade. In no period 
has art so bent her energies to embellish the pathway of merchant 
life. At no period have such prodigious results been achieved, 
whether we consider the immense private fortunes which have been 
accumulated or the changes which have been wrought upon the 
routes of commerce and the policies of nations within the present 
age. Works which a century ago would have been very cautiously 
undertaken by a nation are now achieved by a single man. Obstacles 
which would have appalled a host of laborers are scarcely accounted 
now. Mountains which laid their veto on enterprise are cast into 
the midst of the sea or penetrated by the shrieking locomotive. The 
question is no longer, What can man do? but, What can an Amer- 
ican not do? Demonstrate that anyplace must be reached in a given 
time and it shall be reached — by land, water, or air. The story which 
Mr. Samuel Slick, that wonderfully philosophic historian, tells of 
Mr. Samuel Patch, to the end that said Patch, making the leap of 
Niagara, came up in the South Seas, will be apocryphal only until it 
be absolutely necessary to make a through passage. When Lieutenant 
Maury, or any other equally scientific gentleman, demonstrates that 
the growth of this country, in all her pecuniary interests, will be 
greatly promoted by direct communication between the Canada lines 
and the other side of creation, dare any doubt that some Patch shall 
be found who will catch one end of a Morse's telegraph wire in his 
teeth, and make the plunge, and carry his coat of asbestos through all 
central fires, and tie the electric cord to some part of Australia? 
And shall we not then have a tunnel in which packages of men, 
women, and children shall be put through on the principle of atmos- 
pheric pressure ? What is to hinder " Young America " from sipping 
his breakfast at the St. Nicholas and placing himself in a spring- 
frame and drawing a long breath and holding it till he is turned out 
in the delivery-office in San Francisco some time before the sun-up 
of that Occidental meridian ? Show that it will pay, and cost is noth- 
ing, and obstacles are nothing. 

The personal rewards of great undertakings are so very large and 
attractive that the young, the strong, and the ardent, are drawn to 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 619 

embark their all upon enterprises making such large promises. They 
pass along your streets and see the stately mansions in which the 
retired merchants live ; houses that stand behind gardens of beauty 
and in the midst of fountains and statuary, and whatever affluent 
ornaments architecture can sell to mammon. They see the rich car- 
riages at the gates, with pampered steeds and pampered drivers, and 
the rich light from gilded chandeliers growing richer as it passes 
through embroidered curtains. They have heard how the merchant 
princes who occupy these goodly places were once moiling trades- 
men in sixpenny businesses. Every young Aladdin desires the lamp 
which is to do such rare things for him. A large number toil on 
without achieving the desired end ; but many succeed. The Whit- 
tington who trudges along the dusty road with his cat hears the 
bells chime when he is made Lord Mayor; and many another ap- 
prentice who stands in the packed street-crowds as his lordship's 
procession moves on says to himself in his heart, " Jack, my boy, 
that's what you have to come to yet." 

It would seem that where so much trading is to be done as the 
world now demands every man has a full fair chance, and that fort- 
une may be won without sacrifices which injure one's manhood and 
damage one's prospect for happiness at that time when all God's 
stewards must give an account of their stewardship. Intelligence, 
large views, system, vigor, and piety, have been well said to be the 
five points of success. Put a penniless man upon the world with 
these, and he can gain all he should gain to meet life's great end 
and obtain life's greatest pleasures. Without intelligence there is 
success in nothing. Without large views a man's daily toil belittles 
him. When he lays his plans for great ends upon great outlays, and 
connects his labors with great principles, and attaches himself to 
lofty enterprises, and feels in brotherhood with the noble men who in 
trade have made their lives illustrious, then, whatever may be his em- 
ployment, he is building himself up while he is building up his busi- 
ness. He is achieving the greatest heroism, self -conquest. But, 
however large the plans, unless there be the well-adjusted clock- 
work of system, the greater the plan the greater the ruin. System 
is the railroad track, vigor is the locomotive — a power on wheels, a 
power in control, not a rash, wild fury. This vigor, which is to be 



620 CHIPS AND CHUNKS ' 

the life of things, is found in a right healthy heart. And there must 
be piety; yes, let us repeat it, there must be piety. Man must have 
his god, and unless the tradesman devote his heart to the service of 
Him to whom the gold and the silver and the cattle upon a thousand 
hills belong he will come at last to worship the image and super- 
scription upon the coin which passes through his hands so often, and 
so often represents a power which seems omnipotent in society. 

Trade-life, in these pressing times, lays us all open to three great 
dangers. 

The first is the expectation of too early success. We make haste 
to be rich. We are not willing to go on the methods which bring 
legitimate gains. We take by-ways. We invent short plans of ac- 
complishing that which properly should occupy many years. Our 
push becomes hurry, and hurry is never healthy. There are dis- 
eased states of trade. They make some very rich, but they injure 
general society and they react upon all ; and frequently with most 
violence upon the richest and most prosperous. Young men peril 
what capital their fathers can place in their hands, and they peril 
their health, and they peril their honor. Some come out, and come 
out rich, but few without injury ; and many are destroyed. Whereas 
trade conducted legitimately would bring slower gains, but surer 
gains, and health of body, intellect, and heart, might be preserved. 
Who would not have his retirement from business postponed a score 
of years to carry out with fortune what adorns fortune? 

Another danger is the liability of setting trade out of ethics, or at 
least of not bringing our moral principles to bear as directly upon 
every act of buying and selling as we do upon other transactions of 
society. It is to be feared that there are mechanics, manufacturers, 
and merchants who are esteemed honorable, and, away from their 
business, would really scorn to do a mean thing, who hold all the 
rights of the great human brotherhood as sacred until they go to 
trade ; and there they have learned to gloss over certain things, to 
call them by some commercial name which conceals the morale of the 
act, and thus to beguile themselves into belief of their own honesty 
and honor, while they daily violate the great laws of reciprocity and 
benevolence which hold society to its place. 

It is possible to begin with carelessness of the rights of others in 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 62 1 

trade, and to go from this to something worse, perverting our moral 
vision until we see things in so wrong a light as to glory in our 
shame. There is no more dangerous doctrine in trade than that the 
end sanctifies the means, that the splendor of success will attract all 
eyes, even the eye of conscience and the eye of God, from the dark 
stains which pollute the robe of golden texture. The present state 
of public opinion tends to nourish this feeling. The man who kills 
another is a murderer, but if he slay his thousands he is a praised 
and pensioned conqueror, and has his place in history. So in trade. 
The man who cheats, on a small scale, is a swindler and a rogue. 
Let him do it on a large scale, and he may hold a court in his little 
palace on some "Avenue." Society must mend in this matter. Each 
man must bring to his dealing the most scrupulous regard for truth, 
honor, and justice. No part of trade must be supposed to lie out- 
side the moral code ; but the decalogue must be as reverently sus- 
pended in the workshop and the warehouse as in the school and the 
church. 

Another great evil is the danger of being betrayed into a false es- 
timate of money ; into regarding it as an end and not as a means. 
What is really the difference between the possessor of $100,000 and 
the owner of $200,000? Manifestly in having at command different 
amounts of that which can be used to gratify proper desires, culti- 
vate the home growth of pleasure, and diffuse happiness among one's 
fellow-men. Beyond so much room to stay in, so much clothing, 
and so much food, no man can possibly appropriate the money at 
his command to personal wants. He may surround himself with 
many new agencies of happiness, he may open fountains which shall 
go purling down the whole barren waste of time, he may use it to 
reach beyond the grave, and plant for himself a grove which shall 
grow rich with leaves and fruits to be ready for him at coming. But 
suppose neither the one-hundred-thousand nor the two-hundred- 
thousand-dollar man shall do this, but each shall live as scantily as a 
beggar, and die with all his money in the vaults, is one richer than the 
other ? Is not the man who has only ten thousand dollars and uses it 
so discreetly as to make his little home a nest for hearts, a miniature 
Paradise, and surrounds himself with many refining agencies and goes 
forth to gladden friendless hearts, is not such a man richer than 



622 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

them both? But the world does not think so. The world must 
educate itself to better views. Money is useful only when used. To 
labor for the mere accumulation of dollars is as wise as to labor for 
the mere accumulation of soap-bubbles, and where there is no ulterior 
end the laborer in each case is a monomaniac. 

Among the competitors for fortunes how many might succeed if 
all the men of trade would cultivate themselves for their occupation 
and train their minds and hearts in settled principles ! And by suc- 
cess I do not mean, as you will gather from what has just been said, 
the mere accumulation of a very large fortune. Is it success to com- 
mence on nothing beyond a determined will, large energy, and a 
dollar, to end with millions and with every generosity of the heart 
pressed out by the weight and crowd of effort, with every spark of 
manliness extinguished under the oft-repeated snows of selfishness, 
with all respect for humanity and all self-respect gone, with all 
delicious things gathered about you and every proper and healthy 
appetite palsy-stricken? Nay, verily. To an ingenuous young ad- 
venturer there are few discouragements like the sight of a gray- 
haired millionaire who has no friends but such as are drawn around 
his old age by money motives, and no relish for the many beautiful 
and great things at his command. 

Ye young mechanics and merchants, take warning. It will be a 
dark day for you when you close up your business, sell out your in- 
terest, invest your hundreds of thousands, and go home to a large 
house largely furnished with all the appliances of luxury, if, while 
you lean back in your cushioned chair to gaze into the cheery grate, 
the blazing coal shall transform itself into an accusing panorama of 
the past. 

There shall rise to your vision the man who, thirty years before, 
saw your dexterity unrighteously make his money your first capital, 
and who went the whole range of beggardom down to the last sub- 
urbs of starvation. And there shall come after him that pale, red- 
eyed woman whose bleeding fingers wrought through the dreary 
night for you, and whom you pinched and pinched, while she grew 
leaner and leaner, and worked less and less, until a cart carried a 
pine box past your door, with a dead female in it, to some poor Pot- 
ters' Field, and there was none to look after her two little ones, to 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 623 

see that the boy did not commit some outrage upon society and 
that the girl did not go down the greedy maw of the leviathan of 
licentiousness. 

And then you shall see that lad who had a good home in the coun- 
try, whose widowed mother had prayed over him from his childhood 
and yielded only to the necessities of the case when she suffered him 
to come into some subordinate station in your warehouse, and you 
allowed him merely enough to pay for poor lodgings and poorer food, 
and you worked him like a dray-horse, and you took no note of that 
weary homesick look when he bent under your loads, while his 
eyes were full of the cottage where his sister and his mother dwelt ; 
and you never went to see him when he was sick, never gave him 
words of encouragement, but were most exact in deducting from 
his scant wages for all the days when he could not lift his aching 
head nor drag his feet to your place of business ; when he lay in fever 
and in his delirium thought he never should be able to find the place 
you sent him to, nor carry the package which was too much for his 
strength, and all day long in his bare garret called for that mother 
and sister for whom he was generously overtasking his noble but 
breaking heart — but they could not hear his voice through the tall 
brick houses of the city and the long green forests that stood be- 
tween. You cannot endure the steadfast gaze of that young face, so 
calm, so open, and so full of pain. 

And then you shall see another sight that will harrow you. A 
young man who had been your clerk shall be brought before you. 
You never sought to teach him correct principles. You never warned 
him. The work, the work — that was all you wanted. And so you 
held him to the tread-mill till late hours, and then he sought recrea- 
tion in the ways of vice ; for there was no one to draw him to places 
of rational amusement, and so from bad to worse he made rapid 
passage to a felon's doom. What was that to you? You paid him 
for the work he did. When he became too vicious to do that work 
without an admonition you set him adrift on the surges of life, and 
the poor swimmer soon gave out ; but the drowning man cursed you 
as he sank, and now you see that upturned face of agony in its dread- 
ful expression of hatred in death. And there is that older clerk, who 
formed himself on your model, and, without your far-reaching and 



624 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

self-saving self-love, but having learned your lesson that money is all, 
was transported by his violent desire of wealth into the crime of for- 
gery, and in the hour of his disgrace perished by his own hand— and 
left his broken-hearted wife and his dishonored children the memory 
of that bloody scene which followed his exposure. 

Selfish tradesmen, these are the phantoms which are to dance round 
your gilded chairs, creep over your Brussels carpets, and scream and 
moan in your tapestried chambers. And is this success— a million in 
the bank and such horrid memories in your hearts ? Is it worth the 
moil and toil of a quarter of a century to lay up such treasures for 
a hard, a deserted, a bitter old age ? It were better for you to be 
bankrupt in your first years, and slide through unfrequented paths 
of poverty and peace to a funeral without a pageant and a grave 
without monumental lies. 

Let us close with a few words of hearty encouragement to those 
who are young in trade. There are fixed laws here as in the physical 
world. Success is not of chance. There are no lucky fellows. The 
sharpest, wisest, strongest, best men are the luckiest. If you set 
yourself against every false principle, against every plan of doubtful 
morality, and shut down your heart against covetousness and an evil 
eye, if you bend your noble manhood to the work you are in, not as 
a slave, but to accomplish what you owe yourself and owe your race, 
you will be lucky enough. You may not grow so rich as sharper men 
who are worse men — that is, if dollars and cents make riches ; but if an 
increased nobleness of spirit, if a liberalized head, if a humanized 
heart, if a ripened manhood, if the respect of those by whom you are 
surrounded, if the love of the many to whom you have found time 
to give a helping hand while building up your own fortune, if an un- 
soiled soul and a fresh spirit be riches for old age, then you shall be 
rich. There is a merchandise that is better than silver and a gain 
that is better than fine gold. 

Having started on your journey to the pacific ocean which bounds 
the west of this continent of life, your shadow stretches long and dis- 
mal before you, in all the discouragements which face youthful ardor 
and enterprise. At mid-day you will achieve success, and the spectral 
shadow, grown small and feeble, shall be trampled beneath your feet. 
In the eventide, when you are finishing the day's pilgrimage and fac- 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 62$ 

ing the sun, your shadow shall fall behind you, long and lengthening 
like posthumous fame, to mark your pathway for other adventurers 
and to measure both your stature and your distance. 



FAITH: IN WALL STREET. 

A LETTER TO A FRIEND. 

My DEAR Mr. X.: From the day you began business in Wall 
Street as broker and banker I have watched your progress and 
prosperity with most friendly interest. In business you are " a 
success." Your probity, perseverance and penetration have enabled 
you to create a most profitable constituency. And yet you are not 
a Christian. This pains and puzzles me. It pains me because I 
know how much is lost out of your life. It puzzles me because it 
shows some moral or intellectual dislocation in a man whom many 
have trusted so much that he could have wrought their financial 
ruin — a man of such grasp of ideas as to have been able to grow a 
great tree of fortune from a little acorn of capital. 

Now, how is this ? Let us try to get at the real cause of this 
state of things. In this letter let me suggest one difficulty. It 
seems to me to lie in a great mistake you make in regard to faith. 
This I gather from our conversations. You have probably been led 
into this error by definitions of faith which you have heard or read. 
It seems strange that we try to define faith. It is wholly unnecessary, 
and some of the definitions are, therefore, very absurd. If you go 
to dictionaries or theologic treatises you are told that faith is be- 
lief, and belief is trust, and trust is faith. That is all any man gets 
out of the books. And why? Because of the intellectual impossi- 
bility of defining to any man what every man and eveiy child knows. 
It is a fact that there is no child old enough to comprehend any 
definition who does not know, and has not for years known, what 
faith is, as well as faith is known by any professor in any theological 
seminary. 

So I shall not attempt to define " faith " or " trust." If you do 
not now thoroughly know what is meant by each word all the men 
and all the angels in earth and heaven could not make you under- 



626 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

stand it. But it may be that you have the idea — many have — that 
religious " faith," or gospel " trust," is something different from the 
faith and trust of every-day life. That is a grave mistake. Faith is 
faith. While there are many degrees of faith there are no two 
kinds of faith. Then, again, you may have confounded " faith " 
and "trust." That is often done, especially in matters of religion. 
Now, all I ask you is simply to apply to religion the common sense 
you have applied to finance. If you do I am sure you will become 
a thoroughly honest and active Christian. It seems to me that in 
nine cases out of ten, where men have thought on the subject and 
failed to become Christians, the difficulty has been that they have 
seemed to feel that there was something unnatural, unreasonable, 
weird, mystic, unearthly, in religious " faith " and " trust." If so, 
all faith and trust are of that character. 

No; Wall Street "faith " and Wall" Street "trust" are faith and 
trust good enough for this world and the next. It is the faith 
which men of science have. It is the faith which mariners have. 
It is the faith which theologians have, and it is the trust which 
lovers, children, merchants, and bankers have. The only difference 
is in the objects. There is faith in the uniformity of nature among 
scientists; in the truths revealed in the Bible among religionists; 
in the laws of mind among philosophers ; in the laws of trade 
among merchants and bankers ; one and the same faith, many and 
various objects. Observe that trust is a distinct thing. You have 
faith in principles, in abstractions ; you have trust in persons or 
things. You have, in certain theories of the laws of mechanics, so 
much faith, for instance, that you would expend $20,000 in the 
building of a bridge in a certain way ; you have never trusted that 
bridge until you have gone over it yourself or sent your family over in 
the carriage, or at least sent over your laden wagons and your valua- 
ble teams. You have " faith " in the laws of trade, but you " trust " 
certain customers. You even have " faith " in some customers you 
will not " trust." You know certain men whom you believe to be 
good, true, honest, and even honorable, whom you would not " trust " 
with ten thousand dollars because you believe that they lack the 
financial ability to carry out successfully the plans they have designed. 

Plainly, now, there must be faith before there can be trust, and 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 627 

just as plainly there may be faith and no trust. In other words, 
faith is indispensable to trust, but may exist without it. Many a 
man believes in Jesus who does not trust him. The appeal every- 
where in the New Testament is to trust our souls for salvation to 
our Lord Jesus Christ. Faith in Him — not assent to any theory, 
hypothesis, or doctrine about him — must, of course, precede trust. 
But it is valueless if trust do not follow. 

Now, how is it in Wall Street ? You know that business would 
come to an end if faith in certain principles did not lead men to 
trust one another. A panic is the result of sudden or wide-spread 
withdrawal of trust. Without trust in one another how are men to 
conduct business? You know that you have purchased and sold 
millions in " securities " you never saw. What does that mean ? 
Simply trust upon your part, upon the part of those who sold to 
you, and on the part of those who bought of you. Every day your 
customers from a great distance order hundreds of thousands of 
shares of stock. They first trust you with their money. They trust 
you with their stock. They have faith in your word that you have 
bought it, and then, again, they trust you with their money because 
they have faith in your integrity as an integral part of you, and they 
believe that you have sold the stock. They know how much they 
had on deposit at the beginning of the transaction ; to that they 
add the profits you report, but which they have never seen ; on the 
total balance they draw a dozen drafts ; their customers have such 
faith and trust that they indorse these drafts over to other customers; 
and so, on a block of stock, believed to represent a few hundreds of 
thousands of dollars, business to the amount of many millions of 
dollars is transacted by hundreds of people who have never seen the 
dollars, nor even the script representing the dollars. 

How many boys and men you have trusted with piles of money ! 
You must trust. We are all so interdependent that no man can live 
without trusting others. When a man on Wall Street, or in relig- 
ious societies, does what shocks trust we resent it vehemently. 
We feel that he has done much more harm than the mere abstrac- 
tion of valuables. The valuables are somewhere. He has done the 
additional grievous Avrong of destroying a portion of men's confi- 
dence in one another. 



628 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

I cannot fail to see how largely you have trusted me, and trusted 
others because you knew that I had trusted them. You have, 
doubtless, done the same in hundreds of other cases. Indeed, 
otherwise no business could be built up. Now, I really think that 
if you had as much faith in the truths of the Gospel as you have in 
the truths of commerce, and if you trusted our Lord Jesus Christ 
as much as you trust even me, you would begin a spiritual business 
which would be as successful as your banking business, and forever 
infinitely more valuable. If you do not trust Him can you explain 
to yourself why. 



LETTERS OF INTRODUCTION. 

One of the most perplexing things in business and in "society" 
is this matter of soliciting, giving, and receiving of letters of intro- 
duction and letters of commendation. When properly given and 
used they are evidently very helpful, as lubricating the wheels of 
social intercourse. That their usefulness may be maintained all 
parties concerned should have clear conception of their function. 

The first use is to make two persons acquainted with each other. 
There are two reasons for my knowing another man : the lower is 
that I may get something from him, the higher that I might give 
something to him. There are many ways in which two persons be- 
come acquainted ; the most of them casual, or, as religious persons 
might say, providential. But sometimes the acquaintance is brought 
about by the intervention of a third party. Now, the greatest moral 
responsibility is upon this third party. Even when people meet in 
crowds, in public conveyances or on the street, the man who makes 
two persons know each other ought to do so with deliberation. It 
seems now well settled among well-bred people that if a man is 
walking on the street with his friend and meets another friend he is 
not obliged by etiquette to make them acquainted. He does not 
know but that good and solid reasons are known to one or the other 
why neither should have the responsibility of a speaking acquaint- 
ance with the other, and as they meet under circumstances which 
preclude inquiry into their wishes it is best to forbear. One of the 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 62g 

most important judicial acts of a man's life is when he determines 
that it is best to make two men acquainted. 

The frequency with which this judicial act is performed, if per- 
formed thoughtfully, at last makes it easy. When two gentlemen 
come together in your office, and you know that they are of the same 
social class, and their characteristics are such as would make an ac- 
quaintance probably agreeable and profitable, you may venture to 
present them to each other; but they must both be so much your 
personal friends that you dare take what is really a liberty with both. 
But should you not be careful not to present a younger to an older 
man, a very poor man to a very rich man, a very inferior to a very 
superior person, a gentleman to a lady, without in each case the con- 
sent of the latter? The morality of the answer to that lies on the 
surface : the greater responsibility is on the superior person. The 
favor is to the inferior, so he need not be asked ; the burden is to be 
laid on the superior, and he or she has a right to be consulted. 

In the presence and hearing of the superior the inferior ought in 
no case to ask for an introduction, because it places two persons in 
a very awkward and perhaps painful position. A knows that B is 
very well acquainted with C. He says, " Now, B, if we should ever 
meet C be sure not to introduce us ; I have reasons for avoiding 
his acquaintance." The next day they are walking together and 
meet C, who abruptly says, " Mr. B, I wish you would introduce 
me to Mr. A." What is to be done in such a case ? What an em- 
barrassment ! 

But the acknowledged superior may ask to have an inferior pre- 
sented to him. It is an act of grace. It is asking no favor ; it is a 
bestowal. 

When we come to letters of introduction the same principles apply 
with increased force, because writing a letter is a more deliberate 
thing, a more impressive thing, a more permanent thing. Moreover, 
there may be reasons why the person to whom application is made 
for a letter of introduction should not furnish it ; these reasons 
would justify him in declining, and satisfy the person refused, but, 
being a gentleman, he cannot communicate them. The refused per- 
son is left to conjecture that the ground of refusal is in himself, and 

he is unhappy and has unpleasant feelings toward the refuser. 
40 



630 



CHIPS AND CHUNKS 



In this whole matter there are some things that are plain and 
others that are not. What not to do seems plain : 

First. I ought not to ask a letter of introduction from any person 
to any other person until I have ascertained that it will be agreeable 
to the one to give and the other to receive. " But this is not an 
easy thing." True, but it is I that want the letter; the giver has 
not solicited me to take it, nor has the person addressed solicited 
me to present it. If the letter will not pay me for going to the pains 
of securing it properly I should do without it. 

Second. Under no circumstance ought I ask a letter from a per- 
son who does not know me, my character, my position, my ante- 
cedents. From a person to whom one must carry a letter of intro- 
duction one should not ask a letter of introduction ; this would seem 
too nearly an axiom to need statement, and yet almost every week 
the writer of these paragraphs has solicitations from strangers to 
give them letters of introduction to very prominent citizens, and 
sometimes even to ladies of social distinction. 

Among friends it is sufficient for one to announce that he is going 
to spend some time in a certain place ; then his friends should think 
to whom they may present him. Letters of introduction should be 
proffered ', not solicited. Between you and a certain friend in London 
there may exist such a state of knowledge and intercourse as may 
preclude you from giving letters of presentation, but there are others 
to whom you may properly send the traveler ; give him, without his 
asking, letters to those. 

Most of the embarrassment of this whole subject would be relieved 
if society tacitly acted upon the rule that no letter of introduction 
to any special individual is ever to be sought ; that a friend should 
proffer his friend a note of presentation whenever he judges that an 
acquaintance would be agreeable to both parties ; and that no account 
is expected of the use of such letter, so that the receiver may feel 
at perfect liberty to use it at his own discretion. 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 63 1 

THE EX-CONVICT. 

AN ARTICLE FOR THE YET UNCONVICTED. 

Perhaps all pastors of churches are called upon to deal with men 
who have been in prison and have served out their terms or other- 
wise got themselves discharged. There was a time in my pastoral 
experience when this phase of human life was not only unknown to 
me, but never thought of. I can recall my sensations when I was 
first interviewed as a pastor by a man who had been in prison. So 
now I can feel how little interest there will be awakened in the 
minds of thousands of readers by the title at the head of this article. 

But I want this article read. 

It is not always to be taken for granted that a man who has been 
in prison is so much worse than all the men who have never been 
arrested, convicted, and incarcerated, as to make a distinct class of 
human beings. This is wholly untrue. Take all the men in Sing 
Sing — New York State prison — and make an accurate rating of their 
total criminality, and it may be safely affirmed that probably there 
is more total criminality in the same number of men walking free in 
the city of New York, doing business, attending theaters and 
churches and mingling in social circles, than in that incarcerated 
crowd. 

This may startle minds that have never studied these questions, 
but a little reflection will show how it may be. The number of 
solitary criminals is. small, and the crimes they commit are of the 
smaller offenses. " Heavy jobs " require many hands. There are 
confederates in crime. When several men unite to commit a crime 
and are taken in the act it is the younger, weaker, least experienced, 
that are caught. The other birds are too old to have salt put on 
their tails. If careful examination were made I think it would be 
found that a majority of convicts have partners in crime still going 
free, while they are more criminal than the convicts. 

Then it is to be remembered that there are men convicted on a 
technicality ; who have meant no crime, but who have fallen under 
the weight of the legal maxim which teaches us that " ignorance of 
the law does not excuse." There are those who commit a misde- 
meanor under the influence of liquor ; and while this should not set 



6$2 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

aside the sentence, because it was wrong to put themselves in that 
condition of peril, still that fact keeps us from placing these convicts 
in the class of those who deliberately, and in the use of their facul- 
ties, plan and execute a felony. The intoxicated man who steals is 
not nearly so great a scoundrel as the sober grog-seller who sold 
him the poison. 

But, whether any convict deserved the prison or not, whether he 
stood in any greater or less criminality before God, the fact that a 
man has been imprisoned under legal sentence is a fact in the con- 
vicf s history. 

Of this fact two things may be said : (i) It can never be taken 
out of his history. (2) If he calculated the costs of detection it is 
highly probable that he did not take this factor into account. He 
probably simply calculated the loss of time in prison and the dis- 
comfort he should endure therein. He did not calculate how, for- 
ever thereafter, the fact that he had been aconvict would remain in his 
history and affect his subsequent career. It is desirable to call at- 
tention pointedly to this. 

A man who has been a convict never gets it out of his own conscious- 
ness. When the fact is known to others they never get it out of their 
consciousness. His relation to society is changed forever. 

This is a tenfold greater punishment than imprisonment with 
hard labor " on bread and water." These pass away with time ; that 
never. This fact ought to make the officers of justice extremely 
careful how they bring men into this position. Carelessness in 
courts will increase criminals. And it ought to make all men, es- 
pecially all young men, exceedingly careful how they allow them- 
selves to be " mixed up " with what may bring them under that 
branding-iron which makes the ineffaceable mark. 

The latest ex-convict of my acquaintance interviewed me the 
other day. What was I to do for him ? I could not recommend 
him for any employment. He had been convicted for doing, while 
intoxicated, a technically illegal thing, by which no one had suffered 
pecuniary loss ; he had injured no one, but he had been in prison. 
That was his story. It might have been false ; it might have been 
true. What should I have done? This is what I did : what do you 
think of it? 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 633 

I advised him to go at once to his former employers, a large com- 
mercial house, at whose instance he had been convicted ; to tell 
them the whole truth of any wrong he had done, stated in the 
strongest way in which truth would allow him to put it ; to call 
their attention to the fact that it was impossible for him to secure a 
position in which to make an honest living so long as he could not 
refer to his latest employers ; that it was in their power to give him 
another chance ; that if they did not they would be prolonging the 
punishment of a man who had paid the legal penalty of his wrong- 
doing — a thing which he should not suppose was their desire ; that 
he had taken this course on the advice of the pastor of the Church 
of the Strangers, who had promised to wait on them, if they desired 
to see him, and confirm the statement. 

Did I do right ? 

Whenever an employe becomes a convict is the responsibility of 
his Christian employer vacated ? 

If each such employer gave the man, when convicted, permission 
to call on him on the expiration of his prison term might not many 
be saved who are now lost ? 

P. S. — Since this was written the ex-convict took my advice, and 
his old firm have given him employment. 



JUSTICE IN BUSINESS. 

Justice goes a great way beyond the mere payment of debts ; it 
is a stern and strict regard for what God has given to every man 
and a punctilious meeting of all claims upon us made in virtue of 
our own humanity and the humanity of the claimants. A man's 
happiness depends upon his character, his reputation, and his 
property. A wanton diminishing of any of these is a sin of injustice. 
When a boy hears your profanity or obscenity, and has his soul 
tainted and his character injured, you have done him injustice. 
When your clerk sees you carry through to apparent success a plan 
which is wicked, so that he is encouraged in straying from integrity, 
you have done him injustice. When a suspicion against a man is 
nursed by your gossiping tongue or slanderous transmission you 



634 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

have done the man injustice. You had no right to weaken him in 
society, just as you have no right to take money or other material 
property which belongs to him. Any act upon your part, not com- 
pelled by duty, which takes from a man the power of being good and 
doing good, is injustice. A man's reputation must be as sacred in 
your eyes as his property. And yet there are men so honest in all 
questions capable of being put in the shape of dollars and cents, so 
determined to have their own money and give every other man his 
money, that, if they have received one cent too much in payment, will 
walk two miles to pay it back to the meanest man that ever traded 
with them, or walk two miles to collect the one cent still due them 
on settlement ; there are men in whose hands you may leave your 
accounts and your money with perfect security, who would starve to 
death before they would even " borrow " your funds without your 
consent, and if you die they will render the last fraction to your 
heirs ; but these same men will meet in the social circle and repeat 
stories they have heard to your disadvantage, and, because they did 
not invent them, feel that they have done you no injustice. Re- 
member that there are a thousand claims which our fellow-men have 
upon us which cannot be reduced to a money formula. The evil 
effect of a mercantile life is that it makes, to the merchant, every 
thing seem indifferent which is not capable of a pecuniary repre- 
sentation. And you, who are merchants of my congregation, must 
guard against that evil. You have not fulfilled the whole law of 
justice when you have collected no more than your dues and paid 
your debts to the last cent. There are claims of honor, of relation- 
ship, of courtesy, of society, upon every one of us, just as binding as 
any pecuniary obligation. Do you call that man just who would 
sell his coat from his back and his shoes from his feet to pay the 
last cent of a gambling debt he made last week at the races, but, 
night after night, lets his wife wait for him till the small hours, and 
gives his children no paternal example and- instruction in righteous- 
ness? I do not. Nor do I call that man just who is so con- 
scientious that he puts his goods as near the front windows as 
possible that his customers may make no mistake in selections, and 
tells them every defect in every case, but grinds his clerks to the 
lowest point of salary that will keep them, drives the beggar from 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 635 

his door, suspects every man of being a rogue until he finds he is 
honest, and is so intent upon being rich that he does not see 
his children out of their beds except on Sunday mornings, and does 
not visit his aged mother once in five years. When the judgment 
throne shall be set and " the books shall be opened " you will find 
that there are other books besides day-books, journals, and ledgers. 



RELIGION AND BUSINESS. 

Christianity does not interfere destructively with men's business, 
but comes in to ennoble and prosper it. 

It is not true that one must retire from the world to be good. 
A merchant, a mechanic, an engineer, a lawyer, in full business may 
be just as saintly as a monk can be. Christianity that interferes 
gently yet powerfully and healthfully with all things has much to 
do with trade and business. There is not one system of morals for 
the market and another for the temple. A man is to be just as 
honest and earnest and pure in selling a yard of cloth or a pound 
of sugar as if he were delivering a truth from a pulpit. It is as cer- 
tainly a mistake to neglect your business for your religion as to neg- 
lect your religion for your business. He has erroneous views of 
both who supposes that any legitimate demand of either interferes 
with any proper demand of the other. The Gospel recognizes bus- 
iness, trade, buying, and selling, as among the lawful and disciplinary 
employments of men. It does not teach that we are to shut up our 
shops and abandon our tools or merchandise. The necessity of 
exertion is laid upon us, and the heavenly Father has made it a 
blessing. We must not make it a curse. And such it is when it 
absorbs and controls our affections, or when it is allowed to inter- 
fere with the proper discharge of our pious duties to God or our 
relative duties to man. 

In the 1 2th of Romans St. Paul puts it in this shape: "Not 
slothful in business, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord ; " from which 
it is apparent that he did not consider diligence in business as inter- 
fering with fervor of spirit, nor spiritual devotion as antagonistic to 
secular pursuits. It must be a point with you to demonstrate that 



636 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

your business is your religion and your religion your business ; that 
one is the body and the other the soul of your life, and that these 
twain are really not twain, but one, so intermingling that no one can 
say, " here his religion begins, there it ends ; here his business be- 
gins, there it ends." Your religion must be to your whole life, not 
as the Gulf Stream to the Atlantic — that daintily gathers in its blue 
robe so that, if possible, it may not touch the darker garment of the 
common sea — but as the salt to the ocean ; present in each drop of the 
water, changing the whole character of all the vast ocean, giving 
its ponderous masses circulation and life, and yet making no increase 
in bulk. 

"Buy;" yes, buy! But when you have bought "be as though 
you possessed not." Go into the markets, put in your money, your 
brains, your strength, and your time. Buy and sell and get gain. 
It is more manly than to be counting beads in a monastery. Young 
merchants have their lives of buying and selling, of gaining and 
losing, before them. We should not call them off because there are 
dangers there. We should not dissuade men from commerce and 
travel because of the perils of the sea. But we should insist upon 
a good ship and compass and chart. Lay down for yourselves, my 
readers, this simple rule of morals : that a man who trades on the 
time, the intellect, or capital at his command, as if it were his own, 
intending to devote the fortunate results thereof to himself, is, in 
his heart of hearts, a dishonest man. You would consider him so if 
you were principal and he agent ; if you had given him the whole 
capital to be used in a certain manner for ends that were yours, he 
to receive merely what you and he had agreed to be handsome 
wages. Any assumption upon his part that he owned the money 
and was to appropriate the profits would lead to a withdrawal of the 
capital and the confidence at once. 

Have you behaved so toward God ? Do you speak of what belongs 
to your Maker in the language of appropriation, saying, " my store, 
my plantation, my stocks, my money, my houses?" And are the 
uses of all these things confined to yourself in fancy and in fact? 
If so, you are a dishonest man. You would just as soon appropriate 
what your neighbor claims to be his if you were sure of no detec- 
tion or even of no penalty. Let us be heartily ashamed of ourselves, 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 637 

all of us. We are agents, not principals ; what we use belongs 
to another, not to us. We must show our books to God. When a 
man uses the property of his lord as if it were his own, entertain- 
ing himself and others upon the property of another as if he pos- 
sessed it in his own right, God does not say to him simply, " Thou 
fool ! " as to the man in the Gospel, but he says, " Thou cheat, thou 
sneak, thou thief! " 

Let two young men begin business with equal abilities and cap- 
ital, the one on the plan of selfishness and the other upon the plan 
of morality ; the one buying and using what he had purchased as 
if he were the supreme judge and there were no responsibility to 
another; the other buying and acting as if he possessed not, and as 
if all belonged to God, as it really does. With the same abilities 
and capital their prospects of success and their perils of failure 
seem naturally equal. But the former is sustained by no high sense 
of responsibility ; the latter is. The former has no consecration to 
his prosperity, the latter has ; the former sinks his profits in his little 
self, the latter lays up treasure in heaven. When the former fails 
in business he is ruined ; all his expectations are blasted ; all the 
intent of his labor fails. When the same mercantile accident 
befalls the latter he has the whole moral result of success ; he has 
done what he started to do — namely, to please God — and God has 
transferred the capital for a season to the charge of another. He 
has no complaints. I beseech you not to break the power and the 
pleasure of business by conducting it on the basis of selfishness! 



AFTER BUSINESS. 



Business ought not to be restful. A true man of business works 
his brain almost incessantly during business hours. There are very 
few employments in which it is smooth sailing all the day long. 
Business has its trouble, its anxieties, its careful watchings. A busi- 
ness man is on the strain all day to keep things right behind him, 
sound under him, and opening before him. 

He has to contend with opposition and competition. There are 
men lying in wait to deceive and ensnare him. He has to put his 



638 CHIPS AND CHUNKS 

whole mind to his business. There must be no diversion. He must 
be wholly in his affairs if he is to be a successful business man. 

His home is that from which he goes to his work and that to 
which he returns from his work. It is very important that a man 
shall enter upon the morning serene. To that end all about his 
house ought to be quiet and sweet. Wife and children and servants 
ought to study his physical and mental needs. He should go down 
from his doorsteps crowned with so many benedictions that he shall 
long for the hour which will allow him to return. Then there will 
be to him nothing behind in the way of bitter memories, and noth- 
ing before in the way of harassing anticipations, to break the full 
power which he shall bring to his work. 

Business over, he should lock up his door behind him and go home 
to be at home. The jaded toiler ought to enter a balmy atmosphere. 
The gentle wife, the loving children, the trained servants, should 
give to his resting-place a charm which makes him forget his cares, 
his anxieties, and his ''bull" and "bear" fights down on the Ex- 
change. 

All these deliciously soothing attentions should come spontane- 
ously. In his home the business man must not be exacting. Per- 
haps the wife has had a day of trial. It's not always easy to man- 
age domestic affairs. Servants are not always angels that, having 
lost their wings in heaven, have come down to human kitchens. 
The children don't always feel well, and they sometimes torment 
their mother and their mother torments them. But each partner 
in the domestic establishment should, as far as possible, keep annoy- 
ing details from the other partner — the wife from the husband, and 
the husband from the wife. The business man, young or old, after 
business hours, ought not to " talk shop." Reading, music, conversa- 
tion, rollicking plays, religious devotions in the season thereof — these 
should fill up the hours after business. The man of business should 
not repel his children because he is tired or because he wants to 
think. He has no right to be thinking about his business after the 
hours. Let the children climb over him. Let them fetch him 
down on all fours ; let them straddle him ; let them chase him around 
the chairs. Let them be gladder to have their father come home 
than to have an angel out of heaven drop down in their midst. It 



FOR EVERY FIRESIDE. 639 

will not only be better for the children, and the wife, and the whole 
domestic circle, but in an especial manner it will be better for the 
business man himself. He will go back to his work fresher, stronger, 
and like a giant. 

But if the business man be so unfortunate as to have no home- 
circle let him be careful in regard to one thing — namely, that he 
abstain from all studies connected with his business. If he be en- 
gaged during the day in finance, don't let him read the newspapers 
in those portions where they give an account of stocks. Let him fre- 
quent no business club; but if he must go to a club let it be one 
of artists, or of men engaged in any ether business but his own. 
Let him set himself systematically to give a certain number of hours 
before sleep to the study of some subject as remote as possible from 
that which engages his attention in business hours. 

Sunday comes after business ; after all the business days of a 
week. Sunday ought to be a day of mental as well as spiritual repose. 
It is not a day on which to read hard books on theology. Even 
the clergyman must abandon his studies on that day. We must 
have repose and quiet and refreshment. That is the reason why 
even intellectual men, when they go to church, don't wish to hear 
great sermons. " Great sermons " are a delusion and snare. Men 
ought not to pursue a long course of hard thinking on Sunday. 
Business men can employ their nights reading treatises on theology 
and metaphysics, and this would do them good. But after all the 
strain of the week it is a mistake to ask intellectual men to listen to 
long arguments. They want that which will quicken the moral 
sense while it soothes the tired spirit ; which will lessen the cares 
of the world and heart and put wind under the tired spirit to lift 
it up. 

It is wise to learn the uses and adjustment of things. It is not 
always " in business ; " sometimes it is " after business." But in busi- 
ness we should do that, and only that, which will make the employ- 
ment of " after business " sweet ; and the employments of " after 
business" should be such as shall make the hours " in business" as 
sweet and refreshing as they are powerful and productive. 








LIFE'S MYSTIC VOLUME 




4f 



O 



PEN before ray wondering eyes, 

Great God, life's mystic volume lies ; 

1 I wait to see thy hand define 
The fadeless record of each line. 

No leaf once closed may I retrace 
To add a word, or word erase ; 
Nor may I guess the joy or gloom 
Inscribed on pages yet to come. 









The past in light I clearly count : 
Judge the intent, tell the amount ; 
But hid in clouds I cannot see 
The history yet awaiting me. 

Yet knowing this, that, great or small, 
My Father's hand will write it all, 
I trust the future, and submit 
To what is past, — what's writ is writ. 

But hear this prayer, O Power Divine ! 
That lift'st each leaf, and writ'st each line 
That where my hands have left a stain 
Christ's blood may make all pure again ; 

Where the last sentence hath its end, 
In mercy, Maker, Father, Friend, 
Write, for the sake of thy dear Son, 
" Servant of Jesus Christ, well done ! " 



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